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Title
How do Zambian smallholder farmers allocate their budget? Evidence of dynamic decision-making based on a Cournot field experiment |
Full text
http://hdl.handle.net/1956/16971 |
Date
2017 |
Author(s)
Gerber, Andreas; Lara-Arango, David; Nyanga, Progress; Kopainsky, Birgit |
Abstract
Article accepted for the 35th International Conference of the System Dynamics Society, 16'20 July, 2017, Cambridge, MA, USA. - Smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa repeatedly face situations of complex and dynamic
decision trade-offs, which include allocating money across short-term and long-term production
activities. Short-term activities such as fertilizer application help to cover immediate food
needs, but compromise future food production. Long- term production activities, such as building up
soil fertility, are important systemic leverage points for future food production, but compromise
present-day harvests. This article reports a Cournot field experiment conducted with Zambian
farmers to investigate farm management decision-making in a dynamic context with conflicting
production objectives. The results revealed that most Zambian smallholder farmers were biased
towards short-term production activities, which led to suboptimal performance in production.
Despite this bias, the farmers applied various distinct dynamic and non-dynamic decision
strategies, with varying production outcomes. Simulation experiments with the decision strategies
revealed that most decision strategies resulted in rather stable production patterns. However,
following some decision strategies, the production patterns strongly varied when the
strategies interacted with other strategies in the same market and the produce was therefore
subject to the strategies' endogenous interactions within the market. Given the
farmers' strong preference for fertilizer, the findings suggest that a shift towards
favoring long-term oriented production activities is required to increase food
production sustainably in sub-Saharan Africa. In conclusion, the various decision
strategies and their endogenous interactions reinforce the need for building adaptive
capacity among smallholder farmers in order to apply context-specific decision
strategies. |
Subject(s)
Farmers' decision-making; Zambia; maize production; non-cooperative; Cournot market experiment; system dynamics |
Language
eng |
Publisher
Gerber et.al. |
Relation
<a href="http://hdl.handle.net/1956/16965" target="blank">The Dynamics of Food Availability in sub-Saharan Africa: An Endogenous Perspective on Food Production Systems</a> |
Type of publication
Conference object; acceptedVersion |
Rights
Copyright the authors. All rights reserved. |
Repository
Bergen - University of Bergen
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Added to C-A: 2017-12-04;09:45:12 |
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