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This study examines the impact of genetically modified maize on labour, cost and input substitutability for smallholders in South Africa. Producers of Roundup Ready® (RR) maize use significantly less child, female and male labour than non-RR producers, resulting in lower costs despite significantly higher herbicide, seed and fertiliser costs. A treatment effects model controlling for selection bias shows that the entire cost advantage and more can be attributed to the Roundup Ready® technology. These results are supported using a nonparametric kernel density estimator. Elasticities of factor substitution indicate strong substitutability among inputs; however, a lack of statistical significance limits the interpretation of the results.

This study examines the impact of genetically modified maize on labor, cost, and input substitutability for smallholders in South Africa. Data was collected during the 2009- 2010 maize production season from 184 households with a total of 212 maize plots in two regions, Hlabisa and Simdlangetsha, located in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Producers of Roundup Ready® (RR) maize use significantly less child, female, and male labor than non- RR producers, resulting in lower costs in spite of significantly higher herbicide, seed, and fertilizer prices. An unrestricted cost function approach is used to evaluate the differences in cost between maize varieties, assuming that households use different input allocations to minimize cost while producing a fixed level of output. A treatment effects model used to control for selection bias shows that the entire cost advantage and more can be attributed to the Roundup Ready® technology. The treatment effects model reveals that RR maize producers have $102.44 (30%) lower costs per maize plot after taking into consideration the inverse Mills ratio, suggesting that the OLS model underestimated the cost-reducing effect of RR maize. Therefore, the entire cost advantage and more can be attributed to RR maize after isolating the effect of RR maize on total cost by disentangling the lower costs attributed to RR maize from those associated with farm and farmer characteristics. These results are confirmed using a nonparametric kernel density estimator. Elasticities of factor substitution indicate strong substitutability among inputs; however, lack of statistical significance limits interpretation of results.

Recent projections on the impact of climate change argue that eastern and southern Africa will be two regions around the globe that will experience dramatic reductions in maize yields by mid‐century. Absent from these projections is any consideration for farmer adaptation of cropping practices or land reallocation. This research quantifies risk, loss and ambiguity aversion for a sample of smallholder Kenyan farmers using framed field experiments. This behavioral information, directly elicited, is used to condition the selection of maize varieties differentiated by drought tolerance, pest resistance, maturity, and seed price. Overall, the willingness to pay for drought tolerance and other attributes is highly heterogeneous as determined through a Latent Class modeling approach. Failing to account for farmer heterogeneity biases the potential welfare gains from this technology. Secondly, willingness to pay estimates identify segments of farmers that are seed‐price sensitive and this elastic demand may limit technology purchase and the eventual impact of this adaptation strategy without seed market intervention.

Recent projections on the impact of climate change argue that eastern and southern Africa will be two regions around the globe that will experience dramatic reductions in maize yields by mid‐century. Absent from these projections is any consideration for farmer adaptation of cropping practices or land reallocation. This research quantifies risk, loss and ambiguity aversion for a sample of smallholder Kenyan farmers using framed field experiments. This behavioral information, directly elicited, is used to condition the selection of maize varieties differentiated by drought tolerance, pest resistance, maturity, and seed price. Overall, the willingness to pay for drought tolerance and other attributes is highly heterogeneous as determined through a Latent Class modeling approach. Failing to account for farmer heterogeneity biases the potential welfare gains from this technology. Secondly, willingness to pay estimates identify segments of farmers that are seed‐price sensitive and this elastic demand may limit technology purchase and the eventual impact of this adaptation strategy without seed market intervention.

Malaria and other transient illnesses have been recognized as factors constraining economic development in tropical countries. The purpose of this paper is to determine the direct and the indirect impact of transient illness shocks, caused primarily by malaria but also including other tropical illness, on family labor use in irrigated rice production in Mali. Family labor is the most important factor of production used in rice production in Mali and transient illness shocks may negatively impact labor supply, production and hence household welfare derived from agricultural income and consumption. Two labor demand models are estimated to determine whether illness does indeed reduce labor supply: one where the dependent variable only includes family labor and a second that combines family and hired labor. These models can be used to test two sets of hypotheses on the relationship between illness and labor supply. First, we hypothesize that short-term transient illness shocks affect household labor supply implying that intrahousehold coping mechanisms are not wholly effective. Secondly, we hypothesize that hired labor markets are ineffective in mitigating illness shocks. We find that direct and indirect health shocks reduce the effective supply of labor and that neither household nor market supply of labor can mitigate these shocks.

New crop varieties often have been promoted in developing countries based upon superior yield vis-a-vis locally available varieties. This research presents a hedonic model for upland rice by drawing upon the input characteristics and consumer good characteristics model literature. Model specification tests determine that a combination of production and consumption characteristics best explains the willingness to pay for new upland rice varieties. This non-separable household model specification determined that four traits explain the willingness to pay for new rice varieties: plant cycle length, plant height, grain elongation/swelling and tenderness. Yield was not significant explanatory variable for the willingness to pay for seed. The implications of this model are two-fold. First, varietal development and promotion must include post-harvest characteristics in addition to production traits when determining which varieties to promote for official release. Secondly, non-yield production characteristics such as plant height and cycle length are significant factors in producers' assessments of the value of a new variety. Overall, this paper provides an alternative explanation for limited adoption of modern upland rice varieties in West Africa: varietal evaluation programs have focused too narrowly on yield evaluation and have not promoted varieties with superior non-yield characteristics than locally available varieties.

This study integrates biophysical simulation data with a farm household model of intertemporal optimization, to investigate changing crop-livestock management practices in the Sudano-Guinean zone of Mali. Over a 15-yr time horizon we find that free grazing on the commons remains more attractive to the representative household than adopting more labor- and capitalintensive confinement systems, but that a relatively low level of pasture tax (around US$3 per livestock unit per year) would be sufficient to induce intensification. Because confinement raises output, the net cost of the tax to the household is only about US$1 per unit per year. Imposing pasture taxes to induce intensification could raise community welfare, if the value of commons resources liberated by reduced grazing pressure exceeds that level. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.