Abstract
Resource poor smallholders in developing countries often lack access to capital goods such as farm machinery. Enabling adequate access through machinery services can thereby significantly contribute to food security and farm incomes. At the core of the service provision model is the lead farmer, who makes the initial investment in agricultural machinery, and provides services to others on a fee-for-service basis. Profiling the lead farmers can thereby provide important lessons and scaling implications. The present paper provides a case study of Bangladesh, using primary data to characterise the lead farmers. General education, credit availability and risk taking attitude play significant roles in whether or not a farm household will be a lead farmer in Bangladesh.
Highlights
Agricultural machinery can provide important benefits and has seen various development initiatives in developing countries, yet the pace of agricultural mechanisation overall and access to agricultural machinery by smallholders in many developing countries, in sub-Saharan Africa, remains quite low
The Dongfeng Power Tillers (PTs) is produced by Shanghai Changzhou Dongfeng Agricultural Machinery Group Co., China, and the Sifeng PT is produced by Zhejiang Sifeng Group Zhejiang Province, China
While farm mechanisation is imperative in developing countries for sustainable agricultural development to ensure food security and enhance livelihoods, there is no agreement on how best to mechanise smallholder farms and ensure wider access to agricultural machinery by resource-poor farm households
Summary
Agricultural machinery can provide important benefits and has seen various development initiatives in developing countries, yet the pace of agricultural mechanisation overall and access to agricultural machinery by smallholders in many developing countries, in sub-Saharan Africa, remains quite low. Contrary to the widely-observed owner-operator system in the developed countries, in Bangladesh and other South and East Asian countries, there are often service providers that make the bulky capital good accessible on a divisible rental basis These are often lead farmers, who initially invest in scaleappropriate agricultural machinery, and provide services to other farmers on a fee-for-service basis (Justice & Biggs, 2013; Mottaleb, Krupnik, & Erenstein, 2016). In Bangladesh, while more than 80 per cent of the agricultural land is cultivated mostly using two-wheeled tractor-driven Power Tillers (PTs), only one in 30 farm households owns a PT (Justice & Biggs, 2013) This means most of the farmers have access to PT services, where PT owners provide PT services. The rest of the paper is organised as follows: Section 2 briefly describes the process of overall agricultural mechanisation in Bangladesh since the 1970s, highlighting the role of market liberalisation under which a number of tariff and non-tariff barriers were removed, facilitating the import of mainly Chinese-made diesel engines and machinery; Section 3 describes the sampling process, the data used, and specifies the econometric models; Section 4 presents the major findings and Section 5 concludes
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