Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics

Ninety-seven percent of Sierra Leonean households prepare food over wood or charcoal, a practice that leads to adverse health and environmental consequences. In this pilot study, we introduced ethanol cookstoves to households in Bo, Sierra Leone. We assessed their potential as an alternative to biomass fuels and the only existing improved cookstove, butane gas. Ethanol cookstoves were economically competitive with butane stoves, but could not outcompete biomass fuel (wood and charcoal). The cookstoves displayed significant benefits to women in time savings and comfort, but raised concerns around alcoholism, unequal access to technologies, and other gendered constraints in the cultural context.

75% of the world's poor reside in rural areas where the local economy is tied to agriculture. We interpret new panel data on COVID-19 from Nepal and Bangladesh in relation to agricultural seasonality. Conditions in April–June 2020 were comparable to a typical lean season even though the pandemic arrived at harvest time. Income losses stem from both depressed local employment as well as lower migration and remittances. We also document indirect adverse health impacts on nutrition and mental health. Findings are specific to the nature of economic activity at harvest, and effective pandemic policy must evolve with the agricultural season.

Transformation toward a sustainable future requires an earth stewardship approach to shift society from its current goal of increasing material wealth to a vision of sustaining built, natural, human, and social capital-equitably distributed across society, within and among nations. Widespread concern about earth's current trajectory and support for actions that would foster more sustainable pathways suggests potential social tipping points in public demand for an earth stewardship vision. Here, we draw on empirical studies and theory to show that movement toward a stewardship vision can be facilitated by changes in either policy incentives or social norms. Our novel contribution is to point out that both norms and incentives must change and can do so interactively. This can be facilitated through leverage points and complementarities across policy areas, based on values, system design, and agency. Potential catalysts include novel democratic institutions and engagement of non-governmental actors, such as businesses, civic leaders, and social movements as agents for redistribution of power. Because no single intervention will transform the world, a key challenge is to align actions to be synergistic, persistent, and scalable.

The increasing frequency of extreme events, exogenous and endogenous, poses challenges for our societies. The current pandemic is a case in point; but "once-in-a-century" weather events are also becoming more common, leading to erosion, wildfire and even volcanic events that change ecosystems and disturbance regimes, threaten the sustainability of our life-support systems, and challenge the robustness and resilience of societies. Dealing with extremes will require new approaches and large-scale collective action. Preemptive measures can increase general resilience, a first line of protection, while more specific reactive responses are developed. Preemptive measures also can minimize the negative effects of events that cannot be avoided. In this paper, we first explore approaches to prevention, mitigation and adaptation, drawing inspiration from how evolutionary challenges have made biological systems robust and resilient, and from the general theory of complex adaptive systems. We argue further that proactive steps that go beyond will be necessary to reduce unacceptable consequences.

Porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) is an extremely contagious disease that causes great damage to the U.S. pork industry. PRRS is not subject to official control in the U.S., but most producers adopt control strategies, including vaccination. However, the PRRS virus mutates frequently, facilitating its ability to infect even vaccinated animals. In this paper we analyze how increased vaccination on sow farms reduces PRRS losses and when vaccination is profitable. We develop a SIR model to simulate the spread of an outbreak between and within swine farms located in a region of Minnesota. Then, we estimate economic losses due to PRRS and calculate the benefits of vaccination. We find that increased vaccination of sow farms increases the private profitability of vaccination, and also transmits positive externalities to farms that do not vaccinate. Although vaccination reduces industry losses, a low to moderate vaccine efficacy implies that large PRRS losses remain, even on vaccinated farms. Our approach provides useful insight into the dynamics of an endemic animal disease and the benefits of different vaccination regimens.

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, Philippines), and Latin America (Colombia). We document declines in employment and income in all settings beginning March 2020. The share of households experiencing an income drop ranges from 8 to 87% (median, 68%). Household coping strategies and government assistance were insufficient to sustain precrisis living standards, resulting in widespread food insecurity and dire economic conditions even 3 months into the crisis. We discuss promising policy responses and speculate about the risk of persistent adverse effects, especially among children and other vulnerable groups.

Farm workers are exposed to high risk of heat-related illness, especially when their jobs require working outside at a fast pace during hot days. Climate change has increased the number of days with high temperatures, and thereby the amount of time that farm workers are likely exposed to extreme heat. To better understand how high heat exposure affects farm workers, this study investigates how crop workers respond to heat exposure and estimates the effects of different pay and work arrangements on workers' responses to heat exposure. We explore, specifically, whether piece-rate arrangements increase workers' effort during periods with high heat exposure compared to workers paid by hourly wages. We use observational data from detailed measurements of localized heat exposure and individual workers' effort in the field. First, these results show workers adjust their effort in response to heat exposure when the heat exposure level changes. Second, piece-rate arrangements increase workers' effort during work shifts. Third, piece-rate arrangements allow workers to modify their effort more easily during different heat exposure levels. When facing low levels of heat exposure, workers who were paid by piece-rate arrangements exert a higher effort than workers paid by hourly wages, up until WBGT is 26.6˚C. When facing high levels of heat exposure (with WBGT exceeding 29.6˚C), workers paid by piece-rate arrangements lower their effort compared to workers paid by hourly wage arrangements.

We consider two aspects of the human enterprise that profoundly affect the global environment: population and consumption. We show that fertility and consumption behavior harbor a class of externalities that have not been much noted in the literature. Both are driven in part by attitudes and preferences that are not egoistic but socially embedded; that is, each household's decisions are influenced by the decisions made by others. In a famous paper, Garrett Hardin [G. Hardin, Science 162, 1243-1248 (1968)] drew attention to overpopulation and concluded that the solution lay in people "abandoning the freedom to breed." That human attitudes and practices are socially embedded suggests that it is possible for people to reduce their fertility rates and consumption demands without experiencing a loss in wellbeing. We focus on fertility in sub-Saharan Africa and consumption in the rich world and argue that bottom-up social mechanisms rather than top-down government interventions are better placed to bring about those ecologically desirable changes.

Most U.S. states that have regulated and taxed cannabis have imposed some form of mandatory safety testing requirements. In California, the country's largest and oldest legal cannabis market, mandatory testing was first enforced by state regulators in July 2018, and additional mandatory tests were introduced at the end of 2018. All cannabis must be tested and labeled as certified by a state-licensed cannabis testing laboratory before it can be legally marketed in California. Every batch that is sold by licensed retailers must be tested for more than 100 contaminants, including 66 pesticides with tolerance levels lower than the levels allowable for any other agricultural product in California. This paper estimates the costs of compliance with mandatory cannabis testing laws and regulations, using California's testing regime as a case study. We use state government data, data collected from testing laboratories, and data collected from lab equipment suppliers to run a set of Monte Carlo simulations and estimate the cost per pound of compliance with California's new cannabis testing regulations. We find that cost per pound is highly sensitive to average batch size and testing failure rates. We present results under a variety of different assumptions about batch size and failure rates. We also find that under realistic assumptions, the loss of cannabis that must be destroyed if a batch fails testing accounts for a larger share of total testing costs than does the cost of the lab tests. Using our best estimates of average batch size (8 pounds) and failure rate (4%) in the 2019 California market, we estimate testing cost at $136 per pound of dried cannabis flower, or about 10 percent of the reported average wholesale price of legal cannabis in the state. Our findings explain effects of the testing standards on the cost of supplying legal licensed cannabis, in California, other U.S. states, and foreign jurisdictions with similar testing regimes.

Effective Jan. 1, 2018, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation enacted a regulation regarding the use of pesticides near public K-12 schools and licensed child day care centers, including a provision that bans specific types of applications, including air-blast and air-assist, during weekday school hours (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) to provide an additional safety margin for pesticide exposure beyond those provided by other regulations. We considered the financial effect on almond growers in nine counties, accounting for four-fifths of total almond production in 2014, if they had been unable to complete a standard spring disease management program on any buffer zone acreage. Results indicated that total annual losses for those counties if such a regulation had been in effect would have been $8.7 million, with per-acre losses ranging from 22% to over 50% of total operating costs, depending on the county. However, using a methodology that took into account historical weather and soil hydrologic group data, we estimated average annual losses in the nine counties among almond growers would have been under $0.2 million because the regulation would have affected the number of sprays completed for relatively few acres in relatively few years.