What kind of labour regime is contract farming? Contracting and sharecropping in Java compared

This article compares contract farming with share tenancy, another labour regime in which smallholder farmers are bound by contract to deliver produce to another, usually more powerful party. Based on research in the Javanese village of Kaliloro, we explore contracting and sharecropping as labour regimes, each with their own specific mechanisms of surplus transfer from producers to non-producers. The cases compared are sharecropping of irrigated rice, contract farming of watermelon, and contract farming of poultry. There are important differences in how labour inputs are organized, how decisions are made, how costs are divided between landowner/contractor and farmer, and in the mechanisms of surplus transfer between the contracting parties. Exploring these differences allows us to understand and compare the role of the two labour regimes in the penetration of capital into the rural economy. Neither contract farming nor share tenancy are in themselves “win-win” or “win-lose” relationships, good or bad for small-scale cultivators. The actual balance of burdens and benefits—often contravening the provisions of written contracts or state regulation—is determined by power relations between the contracting parties.     

Food security,obesity, and inequality: Measuring the risk of exposure to the neoliberal diet

In reviewing the so‐called obesity “epidemic”, we critique the individual‐focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the relevance of structural factors, we develop an index that measures the risk of exposure to what we call the “neoliberal diet” for low‐to‐middle‐income working classes. Using this index, we compare the United States and Canada, advanced capitalist countries that are also agro‐export powerhouses, with a group of countries including the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) plus Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, and Turkey. We conclude that state interventions need to refocus on reducing social inequality and the social determinants of food production and distribution. Transcending individualistic and consumption approaches will help us appreciate that the state, not the individual consumer, is best positioned to implement change when it comes to food “choices” and food production.     

Specifying and Justifying a Basic Capability Set: Should the International Human Rights Framework be given a more Direct Role?

The paper considers the role that the international human rights framework should play in the extension and application of Sen's capability approach. It discusses how emerging international standards in the field of human rights, supported by international human rights law, provide a basis for the specification and justification of lists of central and basic capabilities, and associated lists of duties on governments, international organizations and other international obligation-holders (both at the individual level, and collectively—through international co-operation). The idea of combining the capability framework with a background or supplementary theory of international obligation in the field of human rights is examined in the light of broader theoretical debates about the extension and application of the capability approach. The notion of a “human rights-based capability list” is then introduced. Finally, the paper suggests some possible applications of “human rights-based capability lists” in human rights advocacy and international poverty analysis.     

Food values and heterogeneous consumer responses to nanotechnology

Agricultural applications of nanotechnology are at a relatively early stage and little is known about consumer responses to the technology. Canadian consumer responses to food nanotechnology are examined through the lens of the Food Value Scale. Data from a survey of Canadian consumers are used to evaluate the relative importance of eleven food values to food purchase decisions. We find that taste, safety, nutrition, and price are among the most important food values to Canadians, however, consumers exhibit considerable heterogeneity with respect to the priority placed on these values. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) explores the effect of food values on choice behavior. The DCE is positioned as a sliced apple product with non-browning and antioxidant-enhanced features introduced through the use of nanocoating or a conventional coating method. Random parameters logit (RPL) and latent class models (LCM) confirm the existence of significant preference heterogeneity. The LCM identifies three classes of consumers: “supporters,” “doubters,” and “opponents” who differ in their reaction to nanotechnology and in the relative importance placed on food values such as naturalness, novelty, and convenience. The analysis shows that food values provide additional insights into consumers’ food choices and their attitudes toward novel food technologies.     

A model of the U.S. food system: What are the determinants of the state vulnerabilities to production shocks and supply chain disruptions?

We adapt a Ricardian general equilibrium model to the setting of U.S. domestic agri-food trade to assess states’ vulnerability to adverse production shocks and supply chain disruptions. To this end, we analyze how domestic crop supply chains depend on fundamental state-level comparative advantages—which reflect underlying differences in states’ cost-adjusted productivity levels—and thereby illustrate the capacity of states to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of such disruptions to the U.S. agricultural sector. Based on the theoretical framework and our estimates of the model's structural parameters obtained using data on U.S. production, consumption, and domestic trade in crops, we undertake simulations to characterize the welfare implications of counterfactual scenarios depicting disruptions to (1) states’ agricultural productive capacity, and (2) interstate supply linkages. Our results emphasize that the distributional impacts of domestic supply chain disruptions hinge on individual states’ agricultural productive capacities, and that the ability of states to mitigate the impacts of adverse production shocks through trade relies on the degree to which states are able to substitute local production shortfalls by sourcing crops from other states.     

Reproducing vulnerabilities in agri‐food systems: Tracing the links between governance,financialization, and vulnerability in Europe post 2007–2008

Interconnected sets of vulnerabilities have emerged in the European food system since 2007–2008, raising concerns about food security in a region with arguably some of the most advanced and prosperous economies and environmental governance frameworks. Historically, this is suggesting the current “double jeopardy” problem in food system vulnerability—with systemic declines both in sustainability (the ability of the food system to ecologically renew itself) and food security (the ability of a population to access sufficient nutritional foods and feed itself). By focusing on both drivers and impacts of food system vulnerabilities in the European Union and United Kingdom, this paper explores a grounded and relational approach to financialization—recognized as a key expression of recent growing vulnerabilities. Through the prism of the current socio‐economic pressures facing food producers, and the emergence of potentially “stranded assets” in the agri‐food system more generally, the analysis seeks to show how the combined relationships between neo‐liberalized governance and the market volatilities encouraged by new rounds of financialization are creating “nested” vulnerabilities. As we conclude, a critical, grounded, and systemic understanding of food system vulnerabilities thus becomes a key feature and precursor for potentially developing more resilient agri‐food systems—both regionally and globally.     

Capitalist development in hostile conjunctures: War,dispossession, and class formation in Turkey

This article analyses how periods of geopolitical conflict and violence have affected the development of capitalism and class formation in Turkey. We argue that all major episodes of conflict, violence and war—from forced displacement and ethnic cleansing of the non‐Muslims in the late 19th and the early 20th century, to Kurdish secessionist warfare in the 1990s and the Syrian Civil War—have become major historical turning points in the development of historical capitalism in Turkey. These “hostile conjunctures” transformed capitalism through their direct and indirect effects on dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation. Although each of these conflicts produced a violent dispossession process, none of them resembled the rural dispossession process in England. To make sense of Turkey's experience, we turn our attention to what we call the “Castilian/Spanish road,” and what Lenin called the “Junker/Prussian road” and the “farmers/American road.” Our analysis shows that these differential paths of dispossession, class formation, and capital accumulation have produced highly variegated rather than uniform outcomes. We conclude that we are living in a new “hostile conjuncture,” which is pregnant to a major structural crisis and is generating the preconditions of another historical transformation in the way capitalism operates.     

Efficiency analysis under uncertainty: a simulation study

We model production technology in a state‐contingent framework assuming that the firms maximise ex ante their preference function subject to stochastic technology constraint; in other words, firms are assumed to act rationally. We show that rational producers who face the same stochastic technology can make significantly different production choices. Further, we develop an econometric methodology to estimate the risk‐neutral probabilities, efficiency scores and the parameters of stochastic technology when there are two states of nature and only one of which is observed. Finally, we simulate noiseless data based on our state‐contingent specification of technology. Our state‐contingent estimator recovers technology parameters and other economic quantities of interest without any error. But, when we apply conventional efficiency estimators to the simulated data, we obtain biased estimates of technical efficiency.     

Trade liberalisation and regional integration: the search for large numbers

We surveyed the empirical literature using multi–country computable general equilibrium (CGE) models to analyse potential and actual regional trade agreements (RTAs). The studies indicate that these RTAs improve welfare, that trade creation greatly exceeds trade diversion, and that they are consistent with further global liberalisation. The welfare gains are bigger when models incorporate aspects of “new trade theory” such as increasing returns, imperfect competition, and links between trade liberalisation, total factor productivity growth, and capital accumulation. We also conjectured that an RTA expands market size and stability, allowing firms to pursue economies of fine specialisation, generating additional “Smithian” efficiency gains.     

Shadow wages, allocative inefficiency, and labor supply in smallholder agriculture

This article introduces a method for estimating structural labor supply models in the presence of unobservable wages and deviations of households' marginal revenue product of self‐employed labor from their shadow wage. This method is therefore robust to a wide range of assumptions about labor allocation decisions in the presence of uncertainty, market frictions, locational preferences, etc. We illustrate the method using data from rice producers in Côte d'Ivoire. These data, like previous studies, reveal significant systematic differences between shadow wages and the marginal revenue product of family farm labor. We demonstrate how one can exploit systematic deviations, in the present case related to household characteristics such as the land/labor endowment ratio, to control for both unobservable wages and prospective allocative inefficiency in labor allocation in structural household labor supply estimation.     

Sustainable agricultural intensification in forest frontier areas

The Lore Lindu region in Indonesia—as in many forest frontier areas in Southeast Asia—has experienced rapid deforestation due to agricultural expansion in the uplands, at the forest margins. This has resulted in aggravated problems of erosion and water availability, threatening agricultural productivity growth. At the same time, technical progress is promoting agricultural intensification in the lowlands. In this article, we examine how improved technologies for paddy rice cultivation in the lowlands have affected agricultural expansion and deforestation in the uplands. The question of a “forest‐saving” or “forest‐clearing” effect related to technical innovation is important from a sustainable development perspective and remains a controversial issue in the literature. We address this question for the Lore Lindu region with an empirical model in which expansion in the lowlands and the uplands is estimated simultaneously. We use data from an extensive village survey conducted in the region, combined with GIS data. To guide the empirical analysis, we develop a theoretical framework based on a Chayanov‐type agricultural household model. The model analyzes farmers' land allocation decisions, taking into account the lowland–upland dichotomy in the agricultural sector. The empirical findings, corroborated by the analytically derived results, show how technical progress for lowland production affects land use at the forest margins and how these effects depend on the factor‐intensity of the technology. The findings imply specific rural development policies for sustainable agricultural intensification in forest frontier areas.     

Labour-saving technologies in smallholder agriculture: An economy-wide model with field operations

Labour-saving technologies are relevant for agricultural development. Yet, as this study shows, they are poorly integrated into agricultural production functions of economy-wide models. We report a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, which explicitly incorporating field operations (e.g. land preparation, weeding or harvesting) in the context of smallholder agriculture. The field operations approach allows to model technological trade-offs in organic and conventional production systems at various stages of the agricultural production process. Simulating a structural change scenario, we compare the performance of the field operations approach with published benchmark production structures by assessing how they replicate empirically observed changes in land and agrochemical use. This benchmark analysis shows that incorporating field operations replicates the observed empirical changes most accurately and allows for more realistic modelling of labour-saving technologies. We use the field operations model to investigate three policy options to mitigate labour shortages in the agricultural sector of Bhutan. Permitting the employment of Indian workers in agriculture has the highest short-term potential in this respect. We find that subsidising agricultural machinery hiring services and removing import tariffs on agrochemical inputs are found to be less effective. Further options for model developments, such as combining field operations and labour market seasonality, are highlighted.     

Multi‐Criteria Analysis of Input Use in Agriculture

In this paper we present a methodology for the analysis of input use in the agricultural sector. The novelty of the theoretical model described here is that it has been developed considering a multi‐criteria environment. Thus, the optimal input use condition is determined by evaluating “multi‐attribute utility” and “multi‐attribute marginal utility”. We show how the approach adopted in this paper is a generalisation of the single‐attribute expected utility theory. The theoretical model developed is thereafter implemented in an empirical application that studies water for irrigation use as a particular case. The results show how multi‐attribute utility functions elicited for a sample of 52 irrigators explain differences in irrigation water use in relatively homogeneous agricultural systems, albeit exhibiting dissimilar partial utility functions for water use. We conclude that these differences come from the dissimilar weights that farmers attach to each attribute in the aggregate utility function.     

Subsistence Response to Market Shocks

Microeconomic models posit that transaction costs isolate subsistence producers from output market shocks. We integrate microeconomic models of many heterogeneous households into a general equilibrium model and show that supply on subsistence farms may respond, in apparently perverse ways, to changes in output market prices. Price shocks in markets for staple goods are transmitted to subsistence producers through interactions in factor markets. In the case presented, a decrease in the market price of maize reduces wages and land rents, stimulating maize production by subsistence households; however, real incomes of subsistence households fall.     

Effects of subsidies in Russian dairy farming

This study develops a microeconometric model of specialized dairy farms in the Moscow region using panel data over the period 1995–2001. The model is used to analyze the role of subsidies on profit as well as input and output allocation. Theoretical conditions for short‐term profit maximization are not rejected by the data. Differences between farms allow for a fixed‐effect specification. The dairy producers in the region demonstrate a low responsiveness to market signals, but technology change becomes important. Labor, land, and livestock had low shadow prices. Although subsidies have a distorting effect on the input–output mix, this study shows they relieve the credit constraints on dairy farms and have an important positive influence on farm profit.     

Agent‐based Modelling of Climate Adaptation and Mitigation Options in Agriculture

Computer simulation models can provide valuable insights for climate‐related analysis and help streamline policy interventions for improved adaptation and mitigation in agriculture. Computable general equilibrium (CGE) and partial equilibrium (PE) models are currently being expanded to include land‐use change and energy markets so that the effects of various policy measures on agricultural production can be assessed. Agent‐based modelling (ABM) or multi‐agent systems (MAS) have been suggested as a complementary tool for assessing farmer responses to climate change in agriculture and how these are affected by policies. MAS applied to agricultural systems draw on techniques used for Recursive Farm Programming, but include models of all individual farms, their spatial interactions and the natural environment. In this article, we discuss the specific insights MAS provide for developing robust policies and land‐use strategies in response to climate change. We show that MAS are well‐suited for uncertainty analysis and can thereby complement existing simulation approaches to advance the understanding and implementation of effective climate‐related policies in agriculture.     

IMPLICATIONS OF AGGREGATION BIAS FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF STATIC AND DYNAMIC LINEAR PROGRAMMING SUPPLY MODELS*

Aggregation bias is acknowledged to be one of the more serious problems confronting the Linear Programming approach to supply analysis. Whilst the literature abounds with theoretical solutions to the problem there is a notable lack of ideas on how these solutions might be made operational. This conclusion holds a fortiori for the dynamic case. This paper discusses a practical methodology for the classification of farms in order to minimise aggregation bias, and also the implications of avoiding bias for the specification of dynamic linear models.     

Farm demand for quality potato seed in Indonesia

Seed is the one of the most costly components of potato production in developing countries. Since potato is a vegetatively reproduced crop, diseases such as viruses build up and yield declines as tubers are saved from one harvest for use as seed the next season. Replacing farm‐saved seed with clean seed is one means to increase yield, but information asymmetry between buyers and sellers on seed quality may restrict market supply of this input. In this article we develop a model of the seed market in which clean seed is treated as a capital good providing benefits over several seasons. To determine farm demand for clean seed, we conducted a survey of 182 potato farmers in the major potato growing areas of Indonesia to elicit their perceptions of seed quality from different sources, and derive farmers' “willingness‐to‐pay” for quality potato seed. Results indicate that the effects of information asymmetry on seed supply may be partially offset by the “reputation” of specialized seed producers. Nevertheless, marginal returns to disease‐free seed appear to significantly exceed marginal costs, indicating that improving supply of quality seed will contribute strongly to productivity growth in potato. We discuss several policy options to encourage supply and utilization of quality potato seed.     

Assessing Global Computable General Equilibrium Model Validity Using Agricultural Price Volatility

Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models are commonly used for global agricultural market analysis. Concerns are sometimes raised, however, about the quality of their output since key parameters may not be econometrically estimated and little emphasis is generally given to model assessment. This article addresses the latter issue by developing an approach to validating CGE models based on the ability to reproduce observed price volatility in agricultural markets. We show how patterns in the deviations between model predictions and validation criteria can be used to identify the weak points of a model and guide development of improved specifications with firmer empirical foundations.     

The Impact of Sustainability Aspects in the Meat Sector: A Cluster Analysis Based on Consumer Attitudes and Store Format Choice

Several consumer studies have shown considerable market potential for sustainable meat products, however, their markets shares are still marginal. In Germany, the sustainable aspects “organic,” “local origin,” and “animal welfare” are of special interest. To obtain a precise overview of potential target groups for these meat categories and their choice of store format, 620 German consumers were surveyed on their attitudes toward sustainable meat production and their shopping behavior. First, target groups based on consumers’ attitudes were identified by cluster analysis, taking into account possible overlaps. Consumers were also clustered by their store format choice and their preferred type of meat packaging. A cross tabulation of the results then provided insights into which store format and type of meat packaging is preferred by the target groups for sustainable meat products. Due to overlaps found in the target groups, the existence of important subgroups was shown. Amongst the target groups, only a slight preference for unpackaged meat products was found. Basically, the offer of sustainable meat products appears of interest for all store formats, with particular emphasis on supermarkets. The results of this study can support producers and retailers developing new and tailored marketing strategies for sustainable meat products.