As a result of recent political reforms, Myanmar has the opportunity to enact major policy changes to reinvigorate its agriculture sector. In this context, Myanmar’s rubber sector has the potential to become an even greater source of export earnings and rural household incomes, but there are major challenges related to low rubber productivity and poor rubber quality. Using data from the Mon State Rural Household Survey (MSRHS) conducted from May to June 2015, as well as qualitative data collected from rubber producer focus groups and other interviews with rubber producers, traders, and processors, this paper describes the cost structure of rubber production in Mon State. We then estimate smallholder production costs and the profitability of smallholder rubber production under various alternative yield and price scenarios. The results suggest that if the weaknesses hindering the profitability of the rubber sector are not addressed, the rubber sector will likely stagnate. Moreover, in the absence of a major increase in world prices (substantially above the 2000–2016 average), new rubber investments will not be profitable without major improvements in yield and quality. Further, increasing only yields or only quality, or only improving the institutional environment, will not result in positive returns on investment for smallholders; reforms are needed in all three areas. If these weaknesses are addressed, however, Myanmar’s new investments will be profitable and Myanmar could become an important rubber producer and exporter on the world stage.

This working paper synthesizes findings from four large household and community surveys in Myanmar, each covering a major agro-ecological zone, to evaluate inter-regional variations in the composition of agriculture, livelihoods, and the rural economy, and prospects for production and income growth.

Myanmar has endured multiple crises in recent years — including COVID-19, global price instability, the 2021 coup, and widespread conflict — that have disrupted and even reversed a decade of economic development. Household welfare has declined severely, with more than 3 million people displaced and many more affected by high food price inflation and worsening diets. Yet Myanmar’s agrifood production and exports have proved surprisingly resilient. Myanmar’s Agrifood System: Historical Development, Recent Shocks, Future Opportunities provides critical analyses and insights into the agrifood system’s evolution, current state, and future potential. This work fills an important knowledge gap for one of Southeast Asia’s major agricultural economies — one largely closed to empirical research for many years. It is the culmination of a decade of rigorous empirical research on Myanmar’s agrifood system, including through the recent crises. Written by IFPRI researchers and colleagues from Michigan State University, the book’s insights can serve as a to guide immediate humanitarian assistance and inform future growth strategies, once a sustainable resolution to the current crisis is found that ensures lasting peace and good governance.

Adoption of quality-enhancing technologies is often driven largely by farmers’ expected returns from these technologies. Without proper grades, standards, and certification systems, however, farmers may remain uncertain about the actual financial return associated with their quality-enhancing investments. This report summarizes the outcomes of a short video-based randomized training intervention on wheat quality measurement and collective marketing among 15,000 wheat farmers in Ethiopia. Our results suggest that the intervention led to significant changes in farmers’ commercialization behaviors—namely, it prompted farmers to adopt behaviors geared toward assessing their wheat’s quality using easily implementable test-weight measures, assessing the accuracy of the equipment used by buyers in their kebeles (scales, in particular), and contacting more than one buyer before concluding a sale. The training also led to improvements in share of output sold, price received, and collective marketing, albeit with important limitations. First, farmers who measured their wheat quality received a higher price, but only if their wheat was of higher quality. Second, farmers who found that their wheat was of higher quality were more reluctant to aggregate their wheat (that is, sell their products through local cooperatives) than those who found that their wheat was of lower quality. Lastly, the training intervention led to better use of fertilizer in the following season. Our discovery that a short training intervention can significantly change farmers’ marketing and production behavior should encourage the development of further interventions aimed at enhancing farmers’ adoption of improved technologies and commercialization.

Height-for-age z-scores (HAZs) and stunting status (HAZ<−2) are widely used to measure child nutrition and population health. However, accurate measurement of age is nontrivial in populations with low levels of literacy and numeracy, limited use of formal birth records, and weak cultural norms surrounding birthdays and calendar use. In this paper we use Demographic and Health Surveys data from 62 countries over the period 1990–2014 to describe two statistical artifacts indicative of misreporting of age. The first artifact consists of lower HAZs for children reported to be born earlier in each calendar year (resulting in implausibly large HAZ gaps between January- and December-born children), which is consistent with some degree of randomness in month of birth reporting. The second artifact consists of lower HAZs for children with a reported age just below a round age (and hence implausibly large HAZ gaps between children with reported ages just below and just above round ages), which is consistent with survey respondents rounding ages down more than they round ages up. Using simulations, we show how these forms of misreporting child age can replicate observed patterns in the data, and that they have small impacts on estimated rates of stunting but important implications for research that relies on birth timing to identify exposure to various risks, particularly seasonal shocks. Moreover, the misreporting we identify differs from conventional age-heaping concerns, implying that the metrics described above could constitute useful markers of measurement error in nutrition surveys. Future research should also investigate ways to reduce these errors.

One finds a broad consensus in the literature regarding the lack of good information on trade in Africa, particularly intraregional trade. This paper attempts to identify gaps and remedies in measuring and tracking trade in Africa. We review the major international and regional databases that track trade in Africa, identifying the gaps therein. We also review the studies that have attempted to track informal trade between African countries, and we look at the major ongoing initiatives to track such informal trade. It appears that both international and regional databases suffer from a lack of reporting or from faulty reporting of African trade statistics. Informal trade flows pose an ongoing problem when measuring intraregional trade, although actual border-monitoring initiatives ongoing in selected countries constitute an interesting option for their quantification. When no direct monitoring method is available, estimating gravity equations represents an alternative with which to measure the potential trade between two partner countries, giving us an estimate of missing trade. A final avenue consists of estimating unregistered trade via national accounts data by comparing consumption, production, and declared trade.

A goal of agricultural policy in India has been to reduce farmers’ dependence on informal credit. To that end, recent initiatives have been focused explicitly on rural areas and have had a positive impact on the flow of agricultural credit. But despite the significance of these initiatives in enhancing the flow of institutional credit to agriculture, the links between institutional credit and net farm income and consumption expenditures in India are not very well documented. Using a large national farm household–level dataset and instrumental variables two-stage least squares estimation methods, we investigate the impact of institutional farm credit on farm income and farm household consumption expenditures. Our findings show that in India, formal credit is indeed playing a critical role in increasing both the net farm income and per capita monthly household expenditures of Indian farm families. We also find that, in the presence of formal credit, social safety net programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) may have unintended consequences. In particular, MGNREGA reduces both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures. In contrast, in the presence of formal credit, the Public Distribution System may increase both net farm income and per capita monthly household consumption expenditures.