The Role of Home Gardens in Promoting Multi-Functional Agriculture in Hungary

Home gardens are small-scale family farms managed with traditional methods. Throughout Hungary's history, they have provided food security and diet quality to families who have faced volatile food prices and fluctuating real incomes. If markets function better with European Union (EU) accession, the conditions for reliance on home gardens may weaken—although not for all Hungarians. This paper reports the results of an interdisciplinary project investigating the economic value of home gardens of over 400 farmers in rural Hungary. We find that home gardens generate several public goods, including agro biodiversity and cultural heritage. The most economically, geographically and ecologically marginalized farmers not only manage the home gardens with the highest levels of public goods, but also derive the highest private benefits from them. Should Hungary seek to promote multi functional agriculture in line with the objectives of the EU's reformed Common Agricultural Policy, then provisions for home gardens would need to be incorporated into national programmes and legal frameworks. This research identifies some of the crops and the characteristics of farmers and farming communities that would constitute least cost targets for related programmes. Findings have implications for other EU member Central and Eastern European Countries with similar traditions of home gardening.     

Information,Certification and Demand for Food Safety: Evidence from an In‐store Experiment in Mumbai

Is demand for safe food in developing countries low because of limited ability to pay, or because of lack of consumer awareness and absence of credible certification? To answer this question we conducted a controlled market experiment in Mumbai, India, selling grapes with credible certification labels alongside unlabeled grapes while providing randomly selected consumers with information on salient features of food safety certification. We confirm that informed consumers are more likely to purchase labeled grapes, controlling for prior information and attitudes, and using two (intensive versus extensive) information treatments. Policies related to information/certification could be an important component of improving public health by mobilising latent demand for food safety and hence supply of safer food for the public.     

Does social learning promote cooperation in social dilemmas?

In this study, we analyze how emergence of cooperation is related to social learning. Cooperation is an example of social behavior. It is frequency-dependent that is the success of a particular behavior depends on the number of individuals adopting each behavioral trait. We study how social learning can affect the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas represented by two well-known games: Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) and Snowdrift (SD). We show that, in the PD game, increase in the proportion of social learners leads to the alleviation of the social dilemma. Whereas, in the SD game increasing the proportion of social learners does not always lead to the alleviation of the social dilemma, that is there is no simple monotonic relation between social learning and the weakening of the social dilemma.

     

Rural Bangladeshi consumers’ (un)willingness to pay for low-milled rice: Implications for zinc biofortification

Zinc deficiency is a severe public health problem in Bangladesh. We examine the effects of nutritional information on rural consumers’ willingness-to-pay (WTP) for two ways to increase zinc intake through rice, the main staple crop–low-milling that gives rice grains a distinctive light brown color (a visible trait) and sets it apart from the culturally preferred high-milled white rice grain and biofortification of rice with increased zinc content (an invisible trait), which is also low-milled to retain maximum zinc content. Results of our economic experiments suggest that with nutritional information, consumers are willing to pay a premium of 4.6% for zinc biofortified rice compared to non-biofortified rice, when milled at the same level. However, results confirm the strong preference for high-milled rice by Bangladeshi consumers who discounted low-milled rice by 8%–10% even after receiving information on the nutritional benefits of biofortified or low-milled rice. We find that consumers’ WTP for the two high-zinc-low-milled rice types (biofortified and non-biofortified) is positively correlated with being a female, more educated, belonging to households engaged in non-farm activities and with children under 5 years of age. Results point to the importance of nutritional awareness campaigns for increasing zinc biofortified and low-milled rice consumption and guiding the targeting strategy for such campaigns. Given the consumer preference for high-milled rice, this study also points to the need for exploring the rice fortification strategy to address the challenge of malnutrition.     

Identifying Non‐Adopter Consumer Segments: An Empirical Study on Earthquake Insurance Adoption in Turkey

In recent years, steadily climbing natural disaster losses have increased the need to promote new financial risk transfer mechanisms, including insurance, as a mitigation tool to build resilient communities to recover faster after disaster occurrence. However, while the societal need for such policies is high, demand for natural disaster insurance typically is still low. While there is ample research on positive adoption decisions, reasons for non‐adoption has not yet received the attention it deserves. Using the case of earthquake insurance in Turkey, this study investigates how public policy makers and insurance companies can differentiate non‐adopter segments and consequently develop targeted strategies to stimulate the uptake of disaster insurance. Our study develops a non‐adopter typology consisting of four segments—state reliant positivist, dependers, adversaries, and uninformed loners. Differences among segments provide policy makers and insurance companies with meaningful insights to design and consequently introduce affordable natural disaster insurance to the market.