the study examined the socio-economic and farm level characteristics influencing adoption of rice production technologies in lavun local government area of niger state, nigeria. a total of 76 farmers were randomly selected from 24 villages and data were collected using interview schedule. descriptive statistics, adoption index and discriminate analysis were used to analyze data. the result reve...

Trade and food security discussions have changed significantly in recent years, reflecting a more general change in perspective on “the right price of food” (Swinnen 2011). Until 2007 the dominant view was that low prices for agricultural products were causing poverty and food insecurity among poor households in developing countries. Trade policy discussions emphasized the importance of reducin...

Large-scale dairy farms around Damascus do not have enough land for forage cultivation mainly due to high price of land, allocation of land for vegetable production, which is more economically important than fodder cultivation and unfavourable climatic factors. Farms are therefore forced to transport roughage from distant crop cultivating areas. In the case of the dairy farm described in this w...

We describe a risk programming model that can be used to determine farmers’ willingness-to-pay for weather derivatives. Applying it to a Brandenburg farm reveals that even a highly standardized contract based on accumulated rainfall generates a relevant willingness-to-pay. We find that an underwriter could even add a loading (on the actuarially fair price) which exceeds the level of traditional...

Important agricultural commodity prices more than tripled from prices observed in 2005 and 2006 to those observed in the spring and summer of 2008. Prices subsequently fell precipitously so that by early November 2008 (and continuing in the subsequent few months), the near-term futures prices of corn, wheat, and soybeans stood about 50–70% higher than before the price run-up began.1 The huge pe...

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Recent research on the impact of institutions su¤ers from historical, theoretical, and methodological problems. The historical issue is whether the initially poorer countries became wealthier, as Acemoglou, Johnson, and Robinson (2002) would have us believe. The theoretical question is whether the institutions that should matter are those that protect property rights or those that coordindate i...