New Agricultural Insurance Study Findings Have Been Reported from University of Oxford (Site-specific Agronomic Information and Technology Adoption: a Field Experiment From Ethiopia): Agriculture – Agricultural Insurance

2022 APR 29 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Agriculture Daily -- Investigators discuss new findings in Agriculture - Agricultural Insurance. According to news originating from Oxford, United Kingdom, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Smallholder farmers in Africa typically only have access to blanket fertilizer recommendations which are defined over very broad areas and may not be optimal for local production conditions. The response to such recommendations has generally been poor.”

Financial supporters for this research include Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology, European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant program, project “Taking Maize Agronomy to Scale in Africa (TAMASA)” - Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, CGIAR.

Our news journalists obtained a quote from the research from the University of Oxford, “Using a randomized control trial in Ethiopia, we explore whether targeted extension advice leads farmers to align fertilizer usage to the recommended levels and whether this impacts productivity. We also consider whether coupling the targeted information with agricultural insurance encourages fertilizer investment. Results show that targeted recommendations closed the gap between the amount of fertilizer used and the recommended amounts and this in turn increased productivity and profits.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “We found no differential effect of the targeted recommendation when coupled with agricultural insurance, suggesting that the risk of crop failure is not a binding constraint to fertilizer adoption in this context, or that farmers do not consider agricultural insurance a useful risk-mitigating mechanism.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Site-specific Agronomic Information and Technology Adoption: a Field Experiment From Ethiopia. Journal of Development Economics, 2022;156. Journal of Development Economics can be contacted at: Elsevier, Radarweg 29, 1043 Nx Amsterdam, Netherlands. (Elsevier - www.elsevier.com; Journal of Development Economics - http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-development-economics/)

The news correspondents report that additional information may be obtained from Hailemariam Ayalew, University of Oxford, Oxford Dept Int Dev, Oxford, United Kingdom. Additional authors for this research include Jordan Chamberlin and Carol Newman.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2021.102788. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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