The purpose of this study is to analyze agricultural producers’ willingness to adopt regenerative cover crop practices in their operation and the effects of producer and farm characteristics on willingness to accept (WTA) values. The paper utilizes the double-bounded contingent valuation method to analyze survey responses submitted by producers and non-operating landowners in the Texas and Oklahoma portions of the Southern Great Plains. Results showed an average WTA of $26.38/acre for producers to adopt cover crops and that programs aimed at increasing adoption rates may require more substantial investment compared to those focused on continuity with current adopters.

Climate-smart agricultural and forestry (CSAF) practices prevent greenhouse gas emissions from occurring or increase carbon sequestration. I examine how the development of U.S. CSAF incentives shifted from offset markets to biofuel regulations over time. My perspective is informed by two professional roles I had in developing these standards. First, as an economist at the Chicago Climate Exchange, I developed CSAF offset protocols between 2007 and 2010. Second, between 2022 and 2024, I was an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) when USDA developed a climate-smart agriculture pilot protocol for the sustainable aviation fuel blender’s tax credit. Twenty years ago, there were no U.S. biofuel mandates and CSAF incentives were conceptualized as occurring through offset markets. I explain how, in contrast to cap-and-trade programs, greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural and forestry practices are already included in the baseline of biofuel regulations. This implies that additionality issues, which have impeded the development of CSAF offset standards, are not as applicable to biofuel programs. Specifically, I examine the development of agricultural soil carbon, livestock digester, and forest carbon protocols as case studies. I conclude by discussing how CSAF crediting may evolve in the future.

Floods often displace people and exacerbate their access to finance, affecting the livelihood of daily wage workers in least-developed countries. In August 2017, Nepal experienced the heaviest rainfall in more than 60 years, severely flooding about 80 per cent of the land in the southern part of the country. Using the two-way fixed effects approach and an event study design, we evaluate the impact of severe flooding on the wages of agricultural workers. We show that the 2017 floods resulted in a 9–10 per cent decrease in cash wages among agricultural households while in-kind wages of agricultural laborers increased significantly after the floods, implying that in-kind wages helped mitigate the adverse effects of floods on cash wages. We also investigate changes in assistance, loan-seeking behavior, loan repayment, and collection behavior as mechanisms leading to the risk-mitigating behavior by farmers.

We examine how agricultural subsidies may induce deforestation and interact with conservation programs by analyzing two large-scale national programs in Mexico that have existed simultaneously for more than a decade: an agricultural subsidy for livestock (PROGAN) and a program of payments for ecosystem services (PES). Looking across the entire Mexican landscape, we exploit the surprises in the timing of enrollment in PROGAN's waves, fluctuations in program payments, and the change in the value of the subsidy induced by inflation and currency fluctuations to identify the impacts of the livestock subsidy on environmental outcomes. We find that PROGAN increased municipal deforestation by 7 per cent. The deforestation effects of PROGAN were smaller in municipalities with higher concentrations of PES recipients. We suggest that livestock subsidies could be better targeted to places with low deforestation risk and high livestock productivity to maximize food production and minimize negative externalities caused by deforestation.

Cost-share contracts, offered through working lands programs, are instrumental in addressing environmental externalities from agriculture and generating ecosystem services. However, the persistent trend of noncompliance with cost-share contractual terms has become a problem for funding agencies and policymakers. This paper aims to study noncompliance issues within the US working lands programs using historical county-level panel data (1997–2019) from Louisiana. The results show that noncompliance is attributed more to cancellations than terminations due to flexible provisions within the cancellation option. The significant incentive effect of payment obligations reveals that revisiting payment rates could reduce contract noncompliance and mitigate moral hazard.

Land expansion by existing smallholder farmers (SHFs), aka stepping-up, is a major pathway to the rise of medium-scale farmers (MSFs) in Africa. In this paper, we investigate if and how armed conflicts constrain the ability of SHFs to transition to MSFs. We find that increased conflict intensity reduces the likelihood that a SHF will expand to a larger scale, especially for farmers who rely mostly on farm incomes, rather than off-farm incomes, for their livelihoods. These findings uphold other evidence that peace and stability influence private investment, including land-based investments, that are associated with economic transformation.

This study formally links the literature on R&D-driven productivity growth to studies which examine GHG emission benefits from increased farm productivity growth. Using a global agricultural model and estimates from the literature, this study examines the impact of greater US public agricultural R&D spending over 2025−2035. The results show that roughly doubling public R&D investments in US agriculture could provide greater economic gains relative to its costs over the period 2017−2050. The GHG mitigation co-benefits from these investments also can be enhanced by combining R&D policies with strategies aimed at directly reducing farm inputs.

We estimate the economic cost of nutrient reductions from riparian buffers in two counties in western Maryland. The costs and gains for farmers are estimated for establishing riparian buffers under the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. For nutrient reductions, we utilize nitrogen and phosphorus mitigation loads from the Chesapeake Bay Watershed Model and own estimates from our synoptic studies. We show that costs of reducing nutrients vary based on buffer type, its location, and the nutrient pollutant. We also show that installing riparian buffers alongside existing forests could be a more cost-effective practice for reducing nitrogen than other riparian buffers.

Government is the custodian of the most critical (and limited) factor of production, namely, land. Assuring the security of tenure, arbitrating disputes, and facilitating the transfer or sales of titles renders the land market more efficient and less volatile, attracting investors and promoting sustainable urban development. Land tenure security is also a critical government service that has repercussions on agricultural productivity, housing development, business investment, and the development of urban areas. However, land administration is mired in corruptive practices, elite capture, and inefficient allocation. Globally, only 24% of rural areas are mapped (46 in urban areas), with approximately the same percentage registered, that is, 22%. In Africa, only about 14% of rural land is formally recorded in a public register. Land tenure security can take a variety of forms depending on national regulatory frameworks that allocate land and specify its use. Success stories include transferable user certificates in China and individual land titles in Rwanda. Systematic evaluation of the evidence on tenure programs demonstrates that improved tenure security increases agricultural output (40% on average), increases urban land values (25% on average), and increases household welfare (15% on average). Other observed country-specific benefits include additional years of schooling, better academic performance, access to credit, reforestation, and improved household nutrition. The costs of establishing tenure security in Sub-Saharan Africa include the separate costs of rural (US$ 3 billion) and urban (US$ 2.2 billion) land registration; the cost of digitizing land registries and information to improve efficiency and transparency (US$ 880 million), the cost of strengthening institutions and systems to resolve land disputes and manage expropriations (US$ 960 million) over a ten-year implementation period, and land administration operations and land records maintenance over 30 years (US$ 64 billion). The net present value (8%) of costs is US$ 21.7 billion for rural land tenure and US$ 5.3 billion for urban areas. The benefits of rural land registration were based on the observed 15% household wealth effect noted in the literature. The net present value (8%) of a 30-year benefits stream is US$ 396 billion. The benefit–cost ratio of completing and modernizing land registration and improving land administration coverage and effectiveness in rural Sub-Saharan Africa is 18. The benefits of urban land registration were based on the average 25% increase in property values observed in the literature. Using housing prices for the 20 largest, Sub-Saharan African countries, the net present value (8%) of the benefits over a 30-year period is US$ 237 billion, yielding a benefit–cost ratio of 45 when the average housing price is used. When the population-weighted housing price is used, benefits are valued at US$ 160 billion, yielding a benefit–cost ratio of 30.

Land protection not only supports vital ecosystem services but also poses important challenges for social equity. Three key concerns emerge from economic frameworks about land protection policies: potential lost local economic development, reinforcement of existing structural inequalities, and disparities in access to the benefits of protected land. This article reviews evidence for each concern and identifies research needs as well as potential improvements in policy that could better support equity goals. Pathways forward towards greater equity include specific mechanisms that can ensure local communities benefit from land protection, attention to issues of spatial impacts and timing, explicit prioritization of equity in land protection initiatives, and community-centred processes. Economists have and can continue to play a role in strengthening these dimensions of land protection policies.

We use a dynamic model of the U.S. apple industry separated into organic and conventional production to better measure the impacts of pest or disease outbreaks on producers and consumers, along with an equilibrium displacement model to simulate welfare effects from various shocks compared to a baseline. Our results show that the impacts of the outbreaks differ between organic and conventional production methods. Growers’ and consumers’ responses to shocks differ widely across the industry. Farmers and policy makers should use these findings to appropriately respond to different shocks and production methods.

This study examines the impact of land tenure rights on the adoption of short- and long-term agricultural practices and the impact of these practices on the income and food insecurity for rural households in Burkina Faso. The bivariate probit model and propensity score matching are used to analyze data collected from 4,398 rural households. The results show that ownership of permanent land rights only increases the likelihood of adopting long-term agricultural practices. In addition, adoption of short-term practices increases household income and reduces food insecurity, while adoption of long-term practices only increases household income.

Effective irrigation management is critical for future food supplies and the prosperity of producers engaged in irrigation production. Through a deficit irrigation field experiment, we determine the financial impact on producers caused by changing irrigation costs, corn prices, extreme weather events, and restricting irrigation levels. Results suggest that the optimal economic strategy within our constrained optimization model is to fully irrigate, with the economic impact highly dependent on commodity prices, restriction level, and irrigation costs. The greatest economic losses caused by irrigation restrictions come from decreases in yield. Some simulations resulted in negative profits, indicating that a switch to alternative crops requiring less irrigation may be warranted.

Climate change is one of the largest threats for biodiversity as changing climatic conditions often make existing habitat sites less suitable. This poses new challenges for species conservation, in particular in agricultural landscapes, where climate change may also induce modifications in agricultural land use. To conserve species in agricultural landscapes, agri-environment schemes (AES) which compensate farmers for implementing conservation measures are commonly used. However, current research on the cost-effective design of AES largely ignores necessary adaptations of conservation measures given climate change. We develop a climate-ecological-economic (CEE) model to examine how the cost-effective design of AES has to be modified under climate change. We apply the model to the conservation of eight meadow bird species in Northern Germany and determine the cost-effective conservation measures under recent and future climatic conditions. We find that the timing of conservation measures in the AES needs to be changed in the RCP8.5 scenario given the species’ phenological adaptations and the impact of extreme events (inundations) on costs. The novelty of the research lies in the development of a CEE model which considers both spatial and temporal changes in costs and benefits to develop recommendations for the cost-effective design of AES under climate change.

This article charts and analyses the change path and various transformations of Malaysia’s state-owned enterprise, the Federal Land Development Agency, from its establishment in the 1960s to the present. The analysis supports arguments that the model of the developmental state, based on planned public/private cooperation, provides an alternative policy prescription to that of sole reliance on the self-regulating market. The Federal Land Development Agency is shown not only to have survived but also to have thrived as an economic development arm of the Malaysian state, successfully adapting to the changing environment in which it operates. To delineate the changes, a framework of punctuated equilibrium is utilised as it best captures the instances of rapid discontinuous change and the periods of incremental change and relative stability.

This article highlights and assesses orthodox responses to three crucial questions in political economy, namely: the role of human capital in the process of economic development, how this role transforms during a period of resource abundance and what is the place of education in empowering labour to reclaim or transform surplus value. Drawing on recent evidence collected from Ghana, a new and young oil economy, it proposes different responses to all these questions which imply the need to replace the concept of ‘human capital’ with ‘human development’ and to move from theoretical to substantivist analysis of oil, education and labour relations.

We contribute to the inverse farm size-productivity puzzle (IR) literature by examining the relationship using a unique data set from southern Ghana that covers farms between 5 and 70 ha. The study uses an instrumental variable (IV) for land size to mitigate some effects of measurement error in land size. The inverse relationship between farm size and farm productivity is upheld when ordinary least squares estimators (OLS) are applied but becomes insignificant although still negative in the IV estimation. The results show that measurement error in land size attenuates the IR. While some studies found the IR to flatten and then become positive, this study finds that in Ghana, the IR only flattens.

This paper combines population and climate data to estimate the volume of migration induced by the drought events that have hit Mali since the late 1980s. The results show that droughts have had the effect of decreasing net migration rates in the affected localities. This is true for both men and women, regardless of their age. The effect of drought episodes, however, is found to differ according to localities and households’ capacity to adapt to climatic constraints: it fades in localities characterized by more diversified crops and in areas that receive more rainfall on average. Climate shocks also had an impact on international mobility: over the 2004–2009 period, around 2300 additional departures per year can be attributed to the droughts that hit Mali during the 2000s. We forecast that, under different climate scenarios and population growth projections, mobility induced by drought events will substantially grow in the next decades.

We explore the economic merits of on-farm water storage with tailwater recovery systems to reduce aquifer depletion in a region with expanding irrigated acreage and substantial off-season precipitation. Gains are substantial on a broad scale and long planning horizon, including more than $4 billion in producer surplus, 5 million acre-feet of conserved groundwater, and land capitalization of $24 per acre. Sensitivity analyses provide insights with respect to the impact of discount rates, rainfed returns, return flows, and aquifer recharge rates. Results can inform stakeholders about the optimal allocation of funds directed at agricultural practice adoption and agricultural water investments.

The Pasture, Rangeland, Forage (PRF) insurance program is aimed to assist producers to manage the risk of forage loss due to the lack of precipitation. However, limited attention has been given to understanding the implications of policyholders’ coverage selection decisions. In this study, three alternative risk-efficient portfolio selection strategies are assessed in to the context of the PRF program. Proposed methods consider all the decision parameters and program restrictions, and they highlighted the underlying relationships between expected revenue, risk, and choice of the coverage parameters. Selection strategies are illustrated by examining the optimal coverage for a grid in South Texas.