Assessing the impact of improved agricultural technologies on household income in rural Mozambique

By B. Cunguara, I. Darnhofer. 2011

179 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In many areas of Africa, rural livelihoods depend heavily on subsistence farming. Using improved agricultural technologies can increase productivity in smallholder agriculture and thus raise household income and reduce poverty. Data from a nationally representative rural household survey from 2005 is used to assess the impact of four technologies - improved maize seeds, improved granaries, tractor mechanization, and animal traction - on household income in Mozambique. To ensure the robustness of the results, three econometric approaches were used: the doubly-robust estimator, sub-classification and regression, and matching and regression. The results show that, overall, using an improved technology did not have a statistically significant impact on household income. This may be associated with a widespread drought that occurred in 2005. Despite drought, distinguishing between households based on propensity score quintiles revealed that using improved technologies, especially improved maize seeds and tractors, significantly increased the income of those households who had better market access. Thus, to allow households to benefit from the use of improved technologies, policy makers need to reduce structural impediments to market participation by ensuring adequate road infrastructure and enabling access to markets.

Subfields: General Agricultural and Biological Sciences, Safety Research, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/00fe00a150201fa363942a29ad12b85894ea1140

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. M. Qaim
2. Thomas DuBois
3. N. Kabunga
4. Baqir Lalani
5. G. Holloway
6. Wen-chi Huang
7. P. Dorward
8. R. Ghimire

In Safety Research

1. Wen-chi Huang
2. N. Kabunga
3. R. Ghimire
4. M. Qaim
5. Thomas DuBois
6. R. B. Shrestha

In Soil Science

1. Wen-chi Huang
2. N. Kabunga
3. R. Ghimire
4. M. Qaim
5. Thomas DuBois
6. R. B. Shrestha

Citations in the corpus

• Smallholder farmers' motivations for using Conservation Agriculture and the roles of yield, labour and soil fertility in decision making (2016, background): “…characteristics) to assess agriculture technology adoption (Uaiene et al., 2009; Benson et al., 2012) or further econometric approaches used to examine the impact of adoption of various improved agricultural technologies on household income in Mozambique (Cunguara and Darnhofer, 2011).”
• Impact of tissue culture banana technology on farm household income and food security in Kenya (2014, background): “Recent research has analyzed productivity, income, and poverty effects of different agricultural technologies (Christiaensen et al., 2010; Cunguara and Darnhofer, 2011; Subramanian and Qaim, 2010; Thirtle et al., 2003).”
• Factors Affecting Adoption of Improved Rice Varieties among Rural Farm Households in Central Nepal (2015, result): “This result is consistent with Cunguara and Darnhofer (2011), and suggested that animal power for plowing is important where the size of the cropped area is smaller and tractor mechanization is not profitable.”
• Unpacking Postharvest Losses in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Meta-Analysis (2015, unknown): “In order to ensure a representative inclusion of available data in the meta-analysis, six countries in SSA were selected based on geographical locations: Ghana and Benin in western, Kenya and Tanzania in eastern, and Malawi and Mozambique in southern Africa.”