Three-quarters of the world’s poor live in rural areas, and the vast majority depends either directly or indirectly on agriculture. Improvements in agricultural productivity can directly and immediately alleviate poverty. While agricultural productivity has dramatically increased in recent decades, these improvements have been uneven. The growth spurred by the Green Revolution, a movement that spread existing technologies to less industrialized nations, has left marginalized groups behind and has generated fewer benefits in certain regions of the world, such as Sub-Saharan Africa.

Technology, broadly defined to include adoption of improved agricultural practices, crop varieties, inputs and associated products such as crop insurance, is key to growth and poverty alleviation. Yet too often rural farmers are unable to adopt beneficial technologies because of constraints that hinder adoption, such as poorly functioning supply chains, missing credit markets, or a lack of information about the technology or how to use it.

 Improving rural farmers’ access to and adoption of beneficial agricultural technologies is a pathway toward growth and poverty alleviation. J-PAL’s agriculture program focuses on researching strategies to overcome constraints on adoption through the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative (ATAI).

ATAI is a collaboration between researchers at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and UC Berkeley’s Center of Evaluation for Global Action (CEGA). Supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and an anonymous donor, ATAI identifies and supports research designed to tell us what is most effective in promoting profitable agricultural technology adoption.

J-PAL's Agriculture Program is co-chaired by Rachel Glennerster and Christopher Udry, and the Program Manager is Ben Jaques. For further inquiries, please contact bjaques@mit.edu.