Policy Insights in Agriculture
J-PAL’s Agriculture sector focuses on improving agricultural systems in developing countries. Our policy insights below summarize general lessons from randomized evaluations on topics including increasing small-scale farmers' access to markets, building resilience to climate change, protecting farmers from risk, incentivizing higher-quality agricultural outputs, and providing credit and information and facilitating savings among small-scale farmers.
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Craig McIntosh (University of California, San Diego) and Tavneet Suri (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Agriculture Co-Chairs
Photo: Tom Gilks | J-PAL
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Increasing small-scale farmers’ access to agricultural markets
Last updated: يناير 2025
Farmers in low- and middle-income countries face challenges accessing markets and earning profits on their agricultural goods. When small-scale farmers have better access to both markets where they buy inputs for their own farming and markets where they sell their goods, they can often invest more...
Leveraging index insurance to protect farmers from weather-based risk
Last updated: أكتوبر 2024
When designed well, insurance does protect small-scale farmers from adverse weather events, but farmers have low demand for these products at market prices. New technologies and climate-smart agricultural practices can reduce farmers’ risk exposure and increase their climate resiliency. More...
Building farmers' resilience to climate change
Last updated: سبتمبر 2024
In the face of weather shocks, improved agricultural technologies and techniques, financial services, and social assistance programs can improve the resilience of small-scale farmers. These tools can help farmers prevent crop losses, avoid consumption cuts or sales of productive assets, or even...
Improving agricultural information and extension services to increase small-scale farmer productivity
Last updated: سبتمبر 2023
Agricultural extension services can be improved by leveraging tools like information and communication technologies, trainer incentives, or social learning to support small-scale farmers’ decisions to invest in new, profitable practices. Extension programs that target both male and female members of...
Incentivizing higher-quality agricultural outputs
Last updated: سبتمبر 2021
Despite making investments in technologies and practices to improve the quality of their products, smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries do not often receive higher prices for their higher-quality agricultural goods. Disorganized markets with many intermediaries may make quality...
Facilitating savings among smallholder farmers to smooth or increase consumption
Last updated: مايو 2019
Offering savings products to smallholder farmers did not transform agricultural investment or output in six studies in sub-Saharan Africa. In a few cases, savings products sometimes benefited farmers by providing a form of risk protection and by helping them smooth consumption over time.
Credit's limited impact on smallholder farm profitability
Last updated: أبريل 2018
Increasing access to traditional microcredit has had limited impacts on smallholder farmers’ profitability in randomized evaluations in developing countries. Demand for new offers of credit was low, ranging from 17 to 33 percent, and even when farmers used traditional credit products to invest in...
