As contractual agriculture expands, contract design offers a non-regulatory opportunity to reduce non-point source pollution. A risk programming analysis of seed corn contract designs illustrates a tractable empirical principal-agent model, and shows that grower risk preferences affect contract...

The public demand for ecosystem services measured by willingness to pay (WTP) in contingent valuation studies provides important information for designing Payment-for-Ecosystem-Service (PES) programs. However, the hypothetical markets for contingent valuation and respondents’ unfamiliarity...

We study a farmer’s decision to convert traditional crop land into growing dedicated energy crops, taking in account sunk conversion costs, uncertainties in traditional and energy crop returns, and learning. The optimal decision rules differ significantly from the expected net present value...

High risk is inherent to agriculture in Turkmenistan, a post-socialist desert country where the political uncertainties of transition exacerbate natural unpredictability. This study examines risk coping strategies of Turkmen farmers based on a survey of 1100 respondents carried out in 2002 in...

In many areas agriculture is exposed to weather related risks. Weather derivatives that get more and more in the focus of interest can reduce these risks. In this study we develop a temperature based weather derivative and analyse how it can reduce the weather-related energy cost risk in...

Markets for transferring catastrophic risk in agriculture are woefully lacking in developing countries. Even in developed countries, markets for transferring the risk of crop losses caused by natural hazards generally exist only with large government subsidies. However, such subsidies can be...

The paper considers the benefit to agricultural producers from commodity price insurance that provides in every year, but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty, a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

A risk management model based on portfolio theory, which accounts jointly for price, quanitity, interest rate, and exchange rate risks, is developed and applied to cocoa and coffee production and exports in the Ivory Coast. Using commodity and financial futures marlets jointly, the results show...

Sudan's irrigated subsector is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. Farming is practised under a scheme-mandated rotation with highly centralized decision making. Under this system, labour is the major input for which the tenant has allocation flexibility both during the season and across the...