Land-poor Households Research Articles

Welfare effect of improved wheat adoption in Tigrai, Ethiopia: A panel data evidence

Technological change in agriculture in land-scarce developing countries is required for land use intensification to feed the growing population. The purpose of this study is to analyze factors affecting adoption decision of improved wheat variety and its effect on households’ welfare in a semi-arid economy of Tigrai, northern Ethiopia. First, a correlated random effect double hurdle model with a control function approach is used to analyze determinants of improved wheat adoption decision and extent of adoption. Second, fixed effect instrumental variable method is used to assess the impact of area under improved wheat cultivation on households’ welfare. Double hurdle model results indicate that access to improved wheat, landholding, male adult and access to information have strong and positive effect on adoption decision and extent of adoption of improved wheat. The impact analysis shows that extent of improved wheat adoption has strong and positive effect on households’ income, consumption, and food security. Moreover, the gender and wealth disaggregation analysis show that extent of improved wheat adoption has a positive and significant effect on welfare of male and female-headed, land poor and land rich households. Thus, adoption of improved wheat is a pro-poor strategy and increasing access to the technology appears a promising pathway for rural development in a land scarce and semi-arid economy like Ethiopia.

Agrarian class relations in Rwanda: a labour-centred perspective

ABSTRACT This paper explores the organization of production in Rwanda’s main coffee producing zone. Most rural households in the region have limited access to land and stable employment. Yet, while differences in property and employment appear small from afar, this paper shows why they are consequential: even when marginal, these differences interact with time and market pressures (e.g. relative dependence on household food production or need for cash) that shape the complex and gendered labour relations between and within generally land-poor households. In a context of heightened precarity, such a labour-centred approach helps chart the prevailing trajectories of accumulation and exploitation.

Intensity of Poverty and Work Diversification: A Study of Female Domestic Workers’ Household

It is now a recognized fact that the earning from a single source does not provide a sufficient means of survival for a majority of poor households in developing countries. Accordingly, most of the poor households depend on a diverse portfolio of activities and income sources. This study is based on a primary survey of 334 female domestic workers in the district of South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India from January to June 2016. The results of intensity of poverty show that 49% of these households are multi-dimensionally poor with 36.4% intensity of poverty. The severity and acuteness of deprivation is addressed by diversification into non-agricultural employment. The wage of the female domestic worker is not only an important determinant of livelihood strategy it is also a motivating factor for diversification. Large sections of the male workforce diversify into various non-farm activities such as manufacturing and construction in the secondary sector or hotel and restaurant, transport and so on in the services sector. Our findings reveal that diversification into non-farm informal sector is a vital option for livelihood sustenance irrespective of landless or land poor households. JEL Codes: J160, J460, J310, R23

Contribution of integrated forest-farm system on household food security in the mid-hills of Nepal: assessment with EnLiFT model

ABSTRACTAbout half of the households in the mid-hills of Nepal are severely food insecure, and the development of agriculture and forestry sectors could hold keys to reduce food insecurity and achieve other sustainable development goals. This paper presents results from a bio-economic model, Enhancing Livelihood from Improved Forest Management in Nepal (EnLiFT), that estimates a Food Security Index (FSI) across six household types in rural Nepal simulating selected agroforestry livelihood interventions. The FSI is calculated as the ratio between household expenditure capacity and household poverty threshold based on the national per capita poverty threshold. Market-oriented timber production shows strong potential to increase food security across all household types with greater benefits accruing to land-rich households. For land-poor households, remittances from household members working abroad remains the strongest route to their food security despite the underutilisation of agricultural land due to adult male labour outmigration. A drawback of market-oriented timber production is the long-term nature of timber production. As EnLiFT assumes that timber can only be harvested from Year 9, complimentary livelihood strategies are required to address food insecurity in the short term. Complimentary agroforestry interventions with the strongest potential to improve food security include combined high-yielding fodder production and commercial goat production, and production of non-timber forest products. Commercial vegetable production does not improve food security because of the high input costs. Currently, farmers in Nepal cannot yet fully obtain the financial benefits of agroforestry due to the complex and unsupportive forestry regulations surrounding harvesting and marketing of planted trees. While land-poor households are seen to rely on foreign remittances for food security, it is argued that policies encouraging use of remittances to promote agroforestry businesses is needed.

Working wives: gender, labour and land commercialization in Ratanakiri, Cambodia

ABSTRACTIn Ratanakiri province, home to a large share of Cambodia's indigenous minorities, land commercialization involving large-scale land transfers and in-migration has led to shrinking access to land for indigenous households. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a household survey conducted in Ratanakiri, this paper explores the links between social reproduction and agrarian production in the current phase of agrarian transition through the lens of everyday gendered experiences. It argues that while wage labour is becoming an essential component of agrarian livelihoods for land-poor indigenous households, gendered hierarchies mediate access to local wage labour opportunities due to the incompatibilities between care work and paid labour. This paper contributes to the literature by exposing locally-specific processes through which gender-differentiated impacts are produced under multiple modes of dispossession. It also illuminates the links between dispossession and social reproduction and the tensions between capitalist accumulation and care activities in agrarian trajectories following land commercialization.

Rainfall shocks and agricultural productivity: Implication for rural household consumption

The paper investigates the impact of rainfall shocks on agricultural productivity and crop-specific agricultural land productivity. The paper also examines the impact of negative rainfall shocks on household consumption as well as its distributional impact by initial wealth and geographical zones. We use nationally representative panel datasets from Nigeria merged with georeferenced rainfall information. Negative rainfall shocks have heterogeneous effects on crop-specific agricultural productivity and based on geographical zones. We use an instrumental variables regression approach, where agricultural land productivity is instrumented with negative rainfall shocks. A negative rainfall shock decreases agricultural productivity and hence decreases household consumption by 37%. We also show considerable differential impacts of rainfall shocks on household consumption by initial values of wealth and geographical zones. Rainfall shocks have a negative, significant impact for asset-poor and nonpoor households, but has a higher impact on household consumption for asset-poor households. Similarly, it has higher impact for land-poor households and households in northern Nigeria.

Political competition and rural welfare: evidence from Pakistan

Can stronger political competition improve rural livelihoods in developing countries? We explore this question in rural Pakistan, showing that greater political competition in a Provincial Assembly (PA) constituency predicts significantly better access to publicly-provided infrastructure and amenities, but no changes in other public goods including perceived access to justice and security. Nonetheless, overall welfare effects appear to be positive: higher political competition predicts higher expenditures per capita, especially among land-poor households. It also predicts higher land values, greater land wealth, and lower land wealth inequality. Further, political competition increases land rental, possibly indicating improved functionality of land markets. Sensitivity analyses suggest that our estimates are unlikely to be substantially affected by omitted variable bias, and they are further similar to instrumental variables estimates. The findings are also robust to use of alternate measures of political competition. Greater provision of both public and private goods appears to explain welfare improvements.

Indigenous innovation incorporates biochar into swidden-fallow agroforestry systems in Amazonian Peru

A pressing challenge facing poor farmers is how to maintain yields in swidden-fallow systems when confronting growing land scarcity and declining soil fertility. The objective of this research is to document the innovative use of biochar and biochar-rich kiln soils on charcoal kiln sites by Amazonian peasant farmers for annual and perennial crop production as part of their swidden-fallow agroforestry cycle. The study was undertaken in a riverside community near Iquitos, Peru, where the availability of primary forest land has decreased significantly over the past 30 years. Charcoal production is a long-standing, near ubiquitous local activity, drawing on wood primarily from secondary forest fallows. Data were collected in 2011 through household interviews (n = 36) and an extensive survey of upland kiln sites (n = 500). Results indicate this innovation, dubbed “kiln site agriculture” (KSA), evolved endogenously within the study community as an adaptation to growing land scarcity. Current landholdings were found to negatively correlate with both the number of crops households (n = 32) cultivated per kiln site (r = −0.3483, p = 0.0254) and the proportion of those sites cultivated with manioc, the local staple crop (r = −0.5441, p = 0.0006), suggesting that land-poor households rely on KSA harvests to supplement subsistence. This study provides evidence charcoal production need not be a rapacious forest use and can, through KSA and biochar, offer an affordable opportunity to peasant farmers who practice swidden-fallow agroforestry where new land in primary forest is scarce and the productivity of their weathered soils is falling.

Pastoral livelihoods of the Fulani on the Jos Plateau of Nigeria

The Jos Plateau is an important cattle-producing area in Nigeria, with a high concentration of pastoral Fulani. In recent decades, pastoralist studies have focused on arid and semi-arid areas, with few based in the sub-humid zones, such as the Jos Plateau. There have been significant socio-economic and agricultural changes in this area over time which makes it necessary to assess current pastoral livelihood strategies. A pastoral livelihood analysis of 66 individual households/herds across 30 villages was conducted, using participatory methods and structured questionnaires. The majority of pastoral households are in the middle or better off wealth categories and only a few are poor in terms of livestock holdings. However, the majority are poor in terms of land holdings. Livestock sales remain the major source of income, but only 30% of households rely on this as their sole source of income. Sale of crops, milk and off-farm activities contributed income in other households. Comparison with previous livestock productivity levels on the Jos Plateau shows that natural resource conflict has increased, with negative effects on productivity, although vulnerability to shocks has decreased over the years. Overall productivity has decreased and calving rates were particularly low. The pastoral Fulani community is relatively well-off, compared to similar populations across West Africa. However, the high proportion of wealth concentrated in livestock and large numbers of land-poor households indicate that there is still a degree of vulnerability to the risks of drought/dry season, disease and conflict in pastoral livelihoods in the area.

The Welfare Impact of Land Distribution: Evidence from a Quasi-Experimental Initiative in Malawi

Even though land reform may be an effective means of reducing poverty, evidence on its causal effects is scant. This paper uses household panel data combined with a quasi experimental program to assess the impact of a joint Malawi/World Bank land redistribution project on households’ productivity and well-being in southern Malawi. Double difference and matching methods are used to address sources of bias in identifying impacts. Results point to average positive effects of the land program on land holdings, agricultural output, income, food security and asset ownership of beneficiary households, while the latter do not see an improvement in access to social services such as schools and health care facilities. There is also evidence of heterogeneous effects by gender and inheritance systems. Overall, our findings suggest that there is scope for reducing poverty and inequality in developing countries by implementing a market- and community-based approach to land reform through the provision of land to land-poor households.

Drought and Population Mobility in Rural Ethiopia

Significant attention has focused on the possibility that climate change will displace large populations in the developing world, but few multivariate studies have investigated climate-induced migration. We use event history methods and a unique longitudinal dataset from the rural Ethiopian highlands to investigate the effects of drought on population mobility over a ten-year period. The results indicate that men's labor migration increases with drought and that land-poor households are most vulnerable. However, marriage-related moves by women also decrease with drought. These findings suggest a hybrid narrative of environmentally-induced migration that recognizes multiple dimensions of adaptation to environmental change.

Risk coping and starvation in rural China

We use a 3-year panel from two poor provinces in Southern China to examine the nature of risks to which rural households are exposed and their ability to insure calorie consumption and spending of total consumption against idiosyncratic shocks to their income. We find that idiosyncratic risks are indeed the main source of income variation in the sample, consumption is better insured than total spending. Unlike total spending where full insurance is rejected in most cases, calorie intake is completely insured for both land-rich and land-poor households in both provinces. Access to even modest amounts of land significantly enhances households’ ability to guard against total spending. Land-rich households are much better insured against total spending than land-poor households. The results are robust across model specifications although Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimations increase the magnitude of difference in total spending between the land-rich and the land-poor. Policies targeting poverty reduction and improving land use rights and land access to the poor could potentially improve the overall risk sharing ability of the rural poor.

Child Farm Labor: The Wealth Paradox

This article is motivated by the remarkable observation that children of land-rich households are often more likely to be in work than the children of land-poor households. The vast majority of working children in developing economies are in agricultural work, predominantly on farms operated by their families. Land is the most important store of wealth in agrarian societies, and it is typically distributed very unequally. These facts challenge the common presumption that child labor emerges from the poorest households. This article suggests that this apparent paradox can be explained by failures of the markets for labor and land. Credit market failure will tend to weaken the force of this paradox. These effects are modeled and estimates obtained using survey data from rural Pakistan and Ghana. The main result is that the wealth paradox persists for girls in both countries, whereas for boys it disappears after conditioning on other covariates.

Modernizing peasant agriculture: Lessons from El Palmar, Colombia

This paper examines the short-run and anticipated long-run output and income results of the modernization of production in a Colombian peasant community, El Palmar. The study finds that in the short run there were increases in output and in producer income, as well as increases in local employment and trade opportunities which benefited land-poor households. However, the incidence of extreme poverty in the community was still high after 10 years of modernization. The gains from modernization had been limited by the failure of the projects to achieve stable, low-risk increases in the productivity of peasant resources, and many producers had pulled back from adoption of full technological packages in favor of selective and limited adoption. The lessons from the community of El Palmar are applied to an assessment of the peasant modernization program of the Colombian government, where it is shown that the problems encountered in El Palmar are reflective of problems with the Colombian modernization strategy in general. The conclusion drawn is that the income gains that can be achieved from the modernization of peasant production, in the context of peasant land scarcity and the poor market conditions for traditional peasant products, are limited.