Crop minimum support price versus cost subsidy: Farmer and consumer welfare

Abstract

Besides using earmark budget to support farmer cost subsidies, governments in many developing countries use minimum support price (MSP) as an alternative subsidy scheme to (i) safeguard farmers' incomes against vagaries in crop price and (ii) ensure sufficient crop production. Among different MSP schemes, we focus on the credit‐based MSP scheme under which a government will not take any possession of a crop; instead, it will credit farmers if the prevailing market price is below the prespecified MSP. In this paper, we consider a market consisting of infinitesimally small, rational, and strategic farmers (with heterogeneous production costs) who face market and yield uncertainties. Our equilibrium analysis reveals that (i) although both cost subsidy and MSP induce more production, cost subsidy leads to a higher crop production than MSP; (ii) MSP improves farmer's and consumer's surpluses; however, cost subsidy improves consumer's surplus but it can decrease farmer's surplus, which is unexpected; (iii) although both programs achieve the same optimal net value (i.e., sum of farmer's and consumer's surpluses minus shortage cost and expenditure), MSP always offers higher farmer's surplus than cost subsidy; and (iv) it is beneficial to invest only in cost subsidy, in both cost subsidy and MSP, and only in MSP, when the budget availability is low, moderate, and high, respectively, so that the net surplus (i.e., sum of farmer's and consumer's surpluses less the shortage cost) is also maximized along with the net value generated being maximized.