Lemon Technologies and Adoption: Measurement, Theory and Evidence from Agricultural Markets in Uganda

Out­line

Over the last half cen­tu­ry, agri­cul­ture in Sub-Sa­ha­ran Africa has failed to ex­pe­ri­ence any sig­nif­i­cant pro­duc­tiv­i­ty im­prove­ments. This is broad­ly viewed as a cen­tral rea­son why the re­gion has not em­barked on a path of sus­tained eco­nom­ic growth and why mass pover­ty is still wide­spread. Low use of mod­ern, but sim­ple, tech­nolo­gies – in­clud­ing fer­til­iz­ers and hy­brid seeds – is of­ten sug­gest­ed as an ex­pla­na­tion for why agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty has re­mained stag­nant. How­ev­er, the rea­son why adop­tion rates are so low re­mains some­what of a mys­tery.

First large-scale as­sess­ment of poor qual­i­ty tech­nol­o­gy preva­lence

Re­cent stud­ies have put for­ward a num­ber of promis­ing ex­pla­na­tions, in­clud­ing miss­ing mar­kets for risk and cred­it, lack of knowl­edge and be­hav­ioral con­straints, and un­cer­tain­ty. In this project, we in­ves­ti­gate a com­ple­men­tary ex­pla­na­tion that takes its start­ing point in the tech­nol­o­gy it­self: the qual­i­ty of the tech­nol­o­gy as pro­vid­ed in the mar­ket. This in­ves­ti­ga­tion pro­vides the first large-scale em­pir­i­cal as­sess­ment of the preva­lence of poor qual­i­ty tech­nolo­gies (fer­til­iz­er and hy­brid seed) in lo­cal mar­kets in Africa and the im­pli­ca­tions this has on the eco­nom­ic re­turns to adop­tion. To this end, we com­bine data from lab­o­ra­to­ry tests with data from re­searcher-man­aged agri­cul­tur­al tri­als. We com­ple­ment the qual­i­ty data which was ob­jec­tive­ly mea­sured with in­for­ma­tion on farm­ers’ be­liefs about the qual­i­ty of in­puts in the mar­ket and their be­liefs about the ex­pect­ed yield re­turns of us­ing ei­ther au­then­tic or mar­ket based in­puts.

We es­tab­lish that low qual­i­ty in­puts are rife in the lo­cal re­tail mar­kets we sur­veyed. The re­sults sug­gest that one rea­son why small­hold­er farm­ers do not adopt fer­til­iz­er and hy­brid seed is that the tech­nolo­gies avail­able in lo­cal mar­kets are sim­ply of too low qual­i­ty to be prof­itable. Our find­ings im­ply in­ter­est­ing av­enues for fu­ture re­search. More gen­er­al­ly, our find­ings high­light the need to iden­ti­fy ways to sub­stan­tial­ly in­crease the qual­i­ty of ba­sic agri­cul­tur­al tech­nolo­gies avail­able to small­hold­er farm­ers.

Re­search Team

Author

David Yanagizawa-Drott

Professor of Development and Emerging Markets

Zurich ZCED

Tes­sa Bold

IIES, Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty

Kayu­ki C. Kaizzi

Na­tion­al Agri­cul­tur­al Re­search Lab­o­ra­to­ries (NARL)

Jakob Svens­son

IIES, Stock­holm Uni­ver­si­ty