Lina Salazar

Estimating the Impacts of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in Peru: A Geographical Regression Discontinuity Approach

In this paper, we evaluate the short term impact of a Fruit Fly Eradication Program in the coastal areas of Peru. Exploiting arbitrary variation in the programs intervention borders, as well as precise geographic location data of farmers households, we use a Geographical Regression Discontinuity (GRD) approach to identify the programs effects on agricultural outcomes. For this purpose, baseline and follow up surveys were collected for 615 households -307 treated and 308 controls- . Baseline data shows that producer and farm-level characteristics in treated and control areas are balanced. This confirms that the programs intervention borders were set only as a function of financial and logistic restrictions and independently of the pest incidence levels and/or other producer and/or farm characteristics. The results show that farmers in treated areas improved pest knowledge and are more likely to implement best practices for plague prevention and control. Beneficiary farmers also present increased fruit crops productivity and sales. The robustness of these findings is confirmed using placebo tests.

The impact of seed market access and transaction costs on potato biodiversity and yields in Bolivia

Using data from Bolivia, this paper analyzes seed market participation and how transaction costs in these markets influence intracrop biodiversity and the influence of biodiversity on yields. Results indicate that seed market attributes such as distance and market-level biodiversity have a crucial effect on a farmers market choice, suggesting that farmers are willing to sacrifice time and income to travel further distances in order to reach markets with a broader range of varieties. This study finds that farmers from this sample who have access to seed markets are more likely to have higher levels of intracrop biodiversity. In addition, for market-integrated farmers, intracrop biodiversity does not seem to have a negative effect on yields, which suggests that improved market access does not threaten biodiversity in contexts with similar characteristics to the study site.

CRIAR: Bolivia: Direct Supports for the Creation of Rural Agrifood Initiatives

The projects general objective is to raise the income of indigenous, native, and campesino men and women engaged in rural community-based small-scale family farming and thereby improve their food security. The projects specific objectives are to: i) provide direct supports to help these smal rural producers adopt agrifood technologies that will increase their output and productivity; and ii) help organizations of small rural producers to develop and start market-oriented agrifood enterprises.