A different story emerges from Peru, where a value chain was created to market native potatoes produced by SHF to high-income consumers in Lima.On the supply side, CAPAC coordinates services provided to producers by different NGOs, which include contract management, quality control, and delivery to the supermarkets. On the demand side, CAPAC participates in national advocacy, the promotion of events, and the creation of labels. The supermarkets themselves have developed their own promotion, including a cooking school and books. And researchers at the International Potato Center developed improved storage methods . There have been multiple initiatives by lead private enterprises, coalitions of private interests, and public-private partnerships to promote the development of similar vertically coordinated value chains. Over the last 15 years, the World Bank Group has spent heavily in value chain development in West African countries with investments in infrastructure , financing of private enterprises, support to producer organizations , development of supporting services , and public sector capacity . This has focused on value chains such as mangos, onions, meat, and poultry in Burkina Faso, and onions and rice in Senegal . Rigorous evaluation of these investments is still not available. These innovation platforms are to help actors in a value chain communicate and coordinate actions to address bottlenecks to value chain development. Swinnen emphasizes the role of identifying appropriate entry points that can consist in financing the lead firm in a value chain so it has resources to in turn finance farmers in interlinked contracts,hydroponic nft system and directly targeting constraints to value chain development such as farmer training, PO development,nft channel and presence of service providers.

As revealed by the FARM Foundation’s review of contracting in value chains in Sub-Saharan Africa, lead private sector enterprises have been important in acting as coordinating agents for value chain development. Coordination can thus be achieved at the cost of competition, creating an interesting trade-off whereby monopsony power in value chains can help facilitate vertical coordination while enhancing value extraction to the benefit of the lead agent. Value chains for low-value domestic staple foods are particularly important for SHFs, but more difficult to develop as discipline is harder to achieve due to the large number of producers and availability of local buyers facilitating side-selling . Yet, success with value chain development for domestic producers is essential if they are to remain competitive with imports, and also potentially help the country make head ways in substituting for rapidly rising food imports. Value chain development does not necessarily come top-down from commercial partners. It can also come bottom-up at the initiative of producer organizations. Collion thus contrasts top-down “aggregation schemes” in Morocco where an agroindustry contracts with producers to secure the provision of produce with quality specifications, to bottom-up “productive alliances” in Latin America where a producer organization develops a business plan that involves contracting with a commercial partner in resource-providing contracts. Capacity of the producer organization to do this typically comes with technical assistance and subsidies provided by the public sector and with the support of international development organizations . Hence, the inclusive value chain development approach to modernization and transformation can come from upstream as well as from downstream agents in the value chain, even if the latter tends to dominate occurrences.While 80 percent of the population is engaged in agriculture, and the agricultural sector contributes with about a quarter of the country’s gross domestic product, agricultural productivity in Mozambique fares among the lowest in the world. Multiple intertwined factors have a bearing on the current productivity levels.

The agricultural technology used, market failures, and farmer’s health and nutritional status during the dry season figure prominently among these reasons. The adoption of improved technologies is often recognized as a critical aspect in addressing food insecurity and poverty. A myriad of research exists on the determinants of adoption. Most of the adoption studies, however, tacitly assume that improved technologies have a positive and significant effect on household welfare, while failing to properly assess the impact of such technologies. Accordingly, there has been a longstanding interest in evaluating the impact of improved technologies on food security and poverty. Empirical evidence on this crucial matter is thin and flawed. Previous studies have focused on rate of return and net present value criteria. These methods, however, have some limitations, especially when the conditions of the investment require substantial commitment under uncertainty arising from prices, yields, technology, and weather. Using a nationally representative household survey from rural Mozambique, this paper aims to fill that void in the literature, by assessing the economic impact of tractor mechanization, animal traction, improved maize seeds, and improved granaries.As a robustness check, the results are drawn from three econometric approaches: the doubly robust estimator, sub-classification and regression, and matching and regression. In general, the use of improved technologies has a positive and significant impact on household incomes, conditional on irrigation use. Scope exists for enhancing the impact of improved technologies, in view of low use of other inputs and irrigation. In addition, efforts to increase agricultural production and productivity should be in tandem with improvements in farmer’s ability to store food.The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the need for improved technologies in rural Mozambique. Section 3 delves into the econometric approaches used, followed by a description of data sources, presented in section 4. Results and discussion are covered in section 5. Section 6 presents the conclusion, while providing some tentative leads for agricultural policy, as well as an agenda for future research.

The importance of agriculture in Mozambique stems both from a high percentage of the population engaged in agricultural activities, and from its economic contribution to the gross national product. Agricultural productivity, however, remains very low, even by African standards. Zavale, Mabaya, and Christy report that maize yields are estimated at 1.4 tons/ha, far below the potential yields of 5 – 6.5 tons/ha. They also found that with the current technology, scope exists for fostering cost efficiency by 70 percent without any loss of the output.Besides cost inefficiency, a number of equally important factors are associated with low agricultural productivity in Mozambique. First, the use of improved agricultural technologies is very limited and unequal. Most of the production is rainfed, with extremely low use of external inputs, particularly among the poorest households, who also depend more on agricultural income. Additionally, of the 2 percent of farmers that used tractor mechanization in 2005, 49 percent were located in Maputo province, a region of relatively lower agricultural potential, but of better infrastructure, including roads. Second, associated with a lower use of improved agricultural technologies are credit and insurance market failures. Asset ownership, particularly liquid assets , and access to non-farm income activities have been shown to play an important role in overcoming credit constraints. Furthermore, agricultural productivity rises significantly with increases in household income in parallel with the diminishing reliance on agriculture of wealthier households.Third, in Mozambique the beginning of the rainy season coincides with the highest rates of malaria incidence. Delays in some agricultural operations due to malaria or any other reasons usually translate into lower production per unit area. Farmer’s health status has been systematically ignored in adoption or impact assessment studies, much less malaria. Notwithstanding its importance, HIV/AIDS pandemic is given far more attention, one of the arguments being its potential effect on labor availability.Fourth, farmer’s nutritional status also plays a crucial role in enhancing agricultural productivity levels. Post-harvest losses significantly reduce household access to food during the dry season. When faced with prospects of high food storage losses, farmers are compelled to forego opportunities for inter-temporal price arbitrage through storage and are observed to sell their produce right after the harvesting season at prices lower than observed prices for purchases in the subsequent lean season. This has been dubbed “sell low, buy high” puzzle. As a result, many farmers are unable to purchase food during the dry season, debilitating their nutritional statuses, which deteriorate their ability to undertake some agricultural operations. To make matters worse, agricultural productivity and land availability appear to be shrinking for many Sub-Saharan African countries ,hydroponic nft including the apparently land-abundant countries like Mozambique. Jayne et al. found that the average per capita cultivated area has been declining over the last 40 years in SSA. The implication is that increases in agricultural production have to be met through increases in agricultural productivity, and less through expansion of cultivated area. Another worsening factor is the climate change and global warming. Some studies predict that global warming will significantly and negatively affect African agriculture.

They also indicate that the use of irrigation reduces the harmful impact of global warming. In addition, irrigation use is a catalyst of improved technology adoption, which will have a substantial impact on food security.The author’s understanding of food security is informed by Sen’s entitlement theory. Farmer’s access to food can be seized either through the output markets or through increases in productivity levels and improvements in food storage. As elicited by the “sell low, buy high” puzzle, the mark-up is usually very high and a significant number of households in rural Mozambique may not afford to purchase food during the lean season. Therefore, it becomes crucial to enhance both agricultural productivity and farmer’s ability to store food. Selective mechanization, improved storage, and other improved agricultural technologies play an essential role in ensuring farmers’ food entitlements. Previous attempts to mechanize the agricultural sector in the post-colonial period have failed, one of the reasons being the 16-year civil war that started a year after the independence in 1975. Moreover, the government established tractor-hire schemes had serious planning, management, and training problems, denting the image of agricultural mechanization in general. Agricultural mechanization is also mistakenly perceived as tractor mechanization. Agricultural mechanization is the use of any mechanical technology and increased power to agriculture. This includes the use of tractors, animal-powered and human-powered implements and tools , as well as irrigation systems, food processing and related technologies and equipment. Although not addressed in this paper, the use of jab planters has been shown to significantly reduce labor requirements. Information on the economic impact of selected improved agricultural technologies is needed to target interventions efficiently and equitably, and to justify investment in such technologies.This paper assesses the impact of improved agricultural technologies by constructing a counterfactual comparison group. In this setting, a comparison of the outcome variable is made between farmers using a given technology and their counterparts with similar observable covariates .The literature on causal inference contains numerous approaches that can be used to evaluate the effect of a farmer’s exposure to a treatment on some outcome . The econometric approaches often encountered in the literature include: instrumental variable approach; regression discontinuity design; bounds approach; difference-in-differences. In addition, Imbens and Wooldridge recommend the use of the doubly robust estimator, matching and regression, and sub-classification and regression. As a robustness check, this paper uses all three approaches. One of the challenges in causal inference is to find a suitable comparison group of which, given the outcome of a treated farmer, one is able to identify what the outcome would look like had the same farmer been untreated. In such an endeavor, researchers often rely on propensity score estimation.The unconfoundedness assumption implies that beyond the observed covariates, there are no unobserved characteristics of the individual associated both with the potential outcome and the treatment. Although the unconfoundedness assumption is not directly testable, this paper assesses its plausibility in the spirit of Heckman, Ichimura, and Todd, by estimating a pseudo causal effect that is known to be zero. Within untreated farmers, the author distinguishes two potential untreated groups, the ineligible and the eligible untreated. The first control group includes widow female headed households. The other control group, the eligible untreated, includes non-widow female headed households and all male headed households who did not use agricultural technology k . Non-rejection of the test makes it more plausible that the unconfoundedness assumption holds. By setting widow female headed households as ineligible untreated, the purpose is obviously not to negatively influence future outcomes for this disadvantaged group. To a certain extent, this paper also aims to demonstrate that this is indeed the case, as consistently reported elsewhere.Table 1 presents descriptive statistics.