Is late really better than never? The farmer welfare effects of pineapple adoption in Ghana |
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Authors: | Aurélie P Harou Thomas F Walker Christopher B Barrett |
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Institution: | 1. Department of Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University, Quebec H9X 3V9, Canada;2. Social Protection and Labor Global Practice, The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA;3. Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Department of Economics, and David R. Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA |
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Abstract: | Export agriculture offers potentially high returns to smallholder farmers in developing countries, but also carries substantial market risk. In this article we examine the intertemporal welfare impact of the timing of a farmer's entry into the export pineapple market in southern Ghana. We examine whether farmers who never cultivated pineapple are better or worse off than farmers who decided to adopt pineapple earlier or later relative to their peers and experienced a significant adverse market shock several years prior to our endline survey. We use a two‐stage least squares model to estimate the causal effect of duration of pineapple farming on farmer welfare. Consistent with economic theory, we find that earlier adoption of the new crop brings greater welfare gains than does later uptake. But we find that the gains to later uptake of pineapple—just before the market shock—are small in magnitude, just 0.1 standard deviations of a comprehensive asset index, indicating that the gains to adoption may be precarious and depend on the context, in particular on the severity of prospective market shocks. |
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Keywords: | C34 F61 F63 I31 O12 Q17 Smallholder welfare Cash crops Market access Pineapple Technology adoption and disadoption |
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