Rachael E. Goodhue

Drosophila suzukii (Diptera: Drosophilidae): Invasive Pest of Ripening Soft Fruit Expanding its Geographic Range and Damage Potential

Spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii Matsumura, a native of eastern and southeastern Asia, is a pest of small and stone fruits. First detected in California in 2008, the insect is now found across the Pacific Coast states. Its penchant for attacking healthy, ripening fruit (as opposed to overripe and rotting fruit favored by other so-called “vinegar flies”) makes it a potential economic threat to a host of soft- and thin-skinned fruit crops including cherry, raspberry, blackberry, blueberry, strawberry, peach, plums, pluots, nectarines, juice grape, table grape, and wine grape. Coordinated research projects to determine host preference, seasonal phenology, biology, and management options are taking place among entomologists in Washington, Oregon, and California. A description of the pest and initial findings on its biology, life history, known and expected geographic range, management and monitoring techniques, and economic considerations are presented and discussed.

Spotted wing drosophila infestation of California strawberries and raspberries: economic analysis of potential revenue losses and control costs

BACKGROUND Economic costs of spotted wing drosophila (SWD) include yield and associated revenue losses, labor and material costs for monitoring and management and revenue losses due to the closure of export markets should fruit from SWD-infested regions be banned by trading partners. This analysis focuses on two types of loss in the California raspberry and strawberry industries: yield losses in the absence of management, and insecticide material costs on a per treatment basis. It computes the cost of a specific management program for raspberries in Californias Central Coast region. RESULTS Insecticide material and application costs per treatment and the cost of the management program are small relative to the yield losses in the absence of management that are observed by growers, researchers and others in initial infestations. CONCLUSION It is difficult to evaluate precisely the share of pest management program costs due to SWD because insecticides are sometimes used to manage multiple pests, and because labor-intensive field sanitation efforts to control SWD are recommended practices already. Given these considerations, this analysis finds that the benefits to SWD management well outweigh the costs examined here. Evaluating the efficacy of managing SWD is essential in assessing the risks that SWD poses and the benefits of pest management programs.

Input Control in Agricultural Production Contracts

tion problems there will be distortionary effects on industry output, and returns from production will be distributed in a predictable way. Regardless of the underlying motivation for contract design, the resulting distribution of returns (and risks) is likely to differ from the traditional spot market distribution. Understanding the incentives underlying the design of agricultural production contracts will aid in predicting their influence on the distribution of returns as their usage increases. In addition to its practical importance, the economic analysis of agricultural production contracts provides an opportunity to test contract theory empirically. Over the past twenty years, contract theory, or mechanism design, has burgeoned as an area of theoretical analysis. This growth in the theory has not been matched by an accompanying empirical literature. There has been only a limited amount of empirical work in these areas, primarily on auctions, as well as executive compensation and franchising (cf. Laffont, Ossard and Vuong, Jensen and Murphy, and LaFontaine). Agricultural production contracts provide an opportunity to test whether asymmetric information models have explanatory value. I consider whether such models are sometimes observationally equivalent to other economic models, and what research techniques will aid in distinguishing among explanations. I address these issues in the context of a

Dynamic Diffusion with Disadoption: The Case of Crop Biotechnology in the USA

Controversy over the use of genetically engineered (GE) crops may have induced some farmers to disadopt these seeds, making a traditional diffusion model inappropriate. In this study, we develop and estimate a dynamic diffusion model, examine the diffusion paths of GE corn, soybeans, and cotton, predict the adoption of those crops over the next two years, and explore the main determinants of the diffusion rate. Our estimates indicate that future growth of Bt crops will be slower or negative, depending mainly on the infestation levels of the target pests. Adoption of herbicide-tolerant soybeans and cotton will continue to increase, unless consumer sentiment in the United States changes radically.

Economic analysis of revenue losses and control costs associated with the spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura), in the California raspberry industry

BACKGROUND The spotted wing drosophila (SWD), Drosophila suzukii (Matsumura), is an invasive vinegar fly with a preference for infesting commercially viable berries and stone fruits. SWD infestations can reduce yields significantly, necessitating additional management activities. This analysis estimates economic losses in the California raspberry industry that have resulted from the SWD invasion. RESULTS California raspberry producers experienced considerable revenue losses and management costs in the first years following SWDs invasion of North America. Conventional producers have since developed effective chemical management programs, virtually eliminating revenue losses due to SWD and reducing the cost of management to that of purchasing and applying insecticides more often. Organic raspberry producers, who do not have access to the same chemical controls, continue to confront substantial SWD-related revenue losses. These losses can be mitigated only by applying expensive insecticides registered for organic use and by performing labor-intensive field sanitation. CONCLUSION SWDs invasion into North America has caused extensive crop losses to berry and cherry crops in California and elsewhere. Agricultural producers and researchers have responded quickly to this pest by developing management programs that significantly reduce revenue losses. Economic losses are expected to continue to fall as producers learn to manage SWD more efficiently and as new control tactics become available.

Agricultural Support Policies in Imperfectly Competitive Markets: Why Market Power Matters in Policy Design

Most agricultural policy analysis assumes that markets are perfectly competitive, despite increasing evidence to the contrary. We demonstrate that the interaction of market power and government intervention may lead to outcomes that are counter to key results of policy analysis for perfectly competitive markets. We show that market power may reduce or eliminate entirely the net welfare benefits from removing two traditional support mechanisms, price floors and deficiency payments, and may increase considerably the governments cost of implementing either of them. Accordingly, optimally designed price support measures may improve welfare in the presence of downstream oligopoly and/or oligopsony power. Copyright 2011, Oxford University Press.

Interactions Between Incentive Instruments: Contracts and Quality in Processing Tomatoes

Contracting and other forms of vertical coordination are important parts of the supply chains for many agricultural products. Often the buyer cares about multiple product attributes affected by a growers actions. Using data that are insulated from common methodological problems, we test whether or not price incentives for two processing tomato quality attributes exhibit complementarity in improving delivered quality. Price incentives for the two attributes are substitutes for the provision of one and complements for the other. This finding has consequences for the profit-maximizing choice of incentive instruments for processors, and contributes to the literature regarding tests for complementarities. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Sustaining Collusion Via a Fuzzy Trigger

Probability theory is the standard economic representation of uncertainty, although it is not always an accurate one. Fuzzy logic is an alternative representation that does not require individual beliefs regarding the explicit functional form of uncertainty. This paper applies fuzzy logic to an oligopoly trigger pricing game. The fuzzy trigger pricing game reverses the standard cyclical price war prediction; collusion-sustaining price wars are most likely to occur during times of high demand. The fuzzy model also predicts that markets with relatively volatile prices are more likely to undergo collusion-sustaining price wars. The predictions are consistent with available empirical evidence.

Traditional property rights, common property, and mobility in semi-arid African pastoralist systems.

Traditional pastoralist land management institutions in sub-Saharan Africa have been stressed by an increasing human population and related forces, including private enclosure of grazing land; government-sponsored privatization; and the increasing prevalence of violent conflicts and livestock theft. We model the incompleteness and flexibility of traditional grazing rights using fuzzy set theory. We compare individual and social welfare under the traditional system to individual and social welfare under a private property system and a common property system. Whether the traditional system is preferred to private property depends on whether the value of mobility, as defined by the traditional system, is more valuable than the right of exclusion inherent in private property. We find that under some conditions the imprecision which characterizes traditional rights can result in higher social returns than a common property regime characterized by complete symmetric rights across all members of the user group and complete exclusion of non-members.

Do Incentives For Quality Matter

We use an unusual dataset involving 14 tomato growers over 4 years to analyze the effect of incentive contracts on behavior in a fixed effects econometric model. We find that growers respond to incentive contracts by improving tomato quality, as predicted by economic theory. The comparison is not confounded by the usual contract endogeneity and simultaneity problems because of characteristics of the processing tomato industry and our dataset. We discuss the implications of our findings for the design of agricultural contracts. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)