Richard H. Bernsten

Informing Food Security Decisions in Africa: Empirical Analysis and Policy Dialogue

Discussions of economic and agricultural development in Africa have focused heavily in recent years on structural adjustment, i.e., basic policy changes aimed at allowing international and domestic markets to play a greater role in coordinating national economic activities. Often these structural adjustments and accompanying policies aimed at improving economic performance have been based on several implicit assumptions about how African food systems operate. Yet, for many countries little empirical information has been available to test these assumptions. Hence, designing policies too often becomes an exercise in planning without facts. This paper argues that not only is there a need to base food security and structural adjustment policies more firmly on empirical information, but that the process by which the information is obtained is as important as the information itself. Agricultural economists and other social scientists can, and increasingly should, design policy research in Africa in ways that simultaneously increase effective demand for empirical information as an input into the ongoing policy process and augment African capacity continually to inform policy deliberations. We illustrate the payoffs to such an approach by drawing on selected experience in several African countries (Weber).

The economic impact of bean disease resistance research in Honduras

This paper presents evidence of recent adoption rates of disease resistant bean varieties (RVs), the farm-level benefits of RV adoption, and the ex post rate of return to disease resistant bean research in Honduras. Results from a farm-level survey in 2001 in the two principal bean-producing regions of the country show that 41-46% of bean farmers (depending upon the season) have adopted an RV, and that adoption is neutral with respect to farm-size and market orientation. An expected utility framework was used to estimate the farm-level benefits of RV adoption, using a combination of experimental trial and farm-level survey data. Adopters gain the equivalent of 7-16% (depending on the variety) in bean income from the yield loss averted through RV use. The ex post rate of return to disease resistant bean research in Honduras from 1984 to 2010 is 41.2%.