The purpose of this research has been to examine the link between agricultural production decisions, particularly ex ante crop choice decisions, and off-farm labor income opportunities available to the cultivator households in a developing country context. The cultivator households in some areas of the developing countries use off-farm labor supply as an insurance against shocks in crop income. Yet employment is uncertain in the off-farm labor market. This thesis hypothesizes that, given limited opportunities for ex post consumption smoothing, employment uncertainty in the labor market influences risk averse farmers' ex ante crop choice decisions and farmers would opt for more conservative crop choices in case they expect unfavorable supply opportunities in the off-farm labor market at a later period. A two period stochastic dynamic programming model is developed. It has been shown that under some particular conditions, risk averse farmers' expectations of a lower depth of the labor market or a lower wage rate in that market in the next period would lead them to allocate more land to crops with safer returns. Again, in the presence of some risk-mitigating factors such as irrigation, farmers would take more risks in crop choices. For estimation, a panel data set from the ICRISAT survey of the semi-arid areas of India is used. Fixed effects and random effects Tobit specifications for estimating household land share and fixed effects and random effects specifications for estimating household crop returns and land share differences have been used. The regression results indicate significant impact of household expectation of the harvesting period male unemployment rates in the off-farm labor market on crop choices, taking the planting period male unemployment rates as a proxy. The results also indicate strong influence of household irrigated land share on crop choices. The results lend weak support for the linkage between crop choice decisions and the share of non-agric.

Keywords: India, off-farm labor market, risk, crop choice.

Agricultural commercialization has been a major development policy in Uganda as in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. The quest is to use agriculture as an engine of development to ensure high income, food security, and industrialization. While effort has been placed in implementing programs targeted towards commercialization, levels of subsistence farming are still high. This dissertation contributes three essays aimed at understanding: (1) output allocation on smallholder farms and determinants of allocation choice, (2) production and income thresholds that may foster increased market participation by smallholder farmers, and (3) the economic benefits created by Ag-Public Private Partnerships (Ag-PPP) to small holder farmers. The first essay (chapter 2) models the farm output allocation process, among Ugandan farmers, to show how farmers distribute production, and documents factors that influence the choice of an allocation strategy. It thus evaluates both participation and the level of allocations. The study analyzes the ex-post decision when output is known with certainty and argues that households maximize utility at this stage; ex-ante decisions become inconsequential at this point. The study finds that levels of self-provisioning are high, approximately 66% of produced output, while commercialization stands at 27%. Furthermore, findings show that crop diversification increases the share of output allocated to home consumption and reduces that for marketing and storage. Non/off-farm income eases the burden of producing for the market - farmers with higher off-farm incomes tended to produce and allocate more for home use. Also, farmers with high output tended to allocate more to the market. We found that household food sufficiency reduced the share allocated to the market and was associated with higher shares allocated to storage. Adopting a policy prescribed enterprise increased shares given to the market and storage and decreased the share for home use. The significance and size of effects on choice of allocation strategy varied by farm size and shock exposure. The second essay (Chapter 3) analyzes the conditions that are necessary to motivate farmers to supply larger output levels to the market. The study investigates this problem by assessing if there exist production and nonfarm income thresholds at which farms can release more output for the market while staying food sufficient. Exploiting temporal and spatial variations in Household Food Sufficiency (HFS) and output allocation in Uganda, findings show income and production thresholds much higher than earned annual average non-farm incomes and farm production. These thresholds lead to varied effects of marketing on HFS. Both farm and nonfarm income are positively associated with HFS, and thus market participation, but the farm income effect is dominant. This suggests that implementing farm-based interventions may provide superior results than nonfarm interventions in securing food security and indirectly market participation in developing countries. Findings further show that the effects of policy outcomes may be incongruous with farmer needs and production circumstances if detailed and in-depth procedures are not considered in policy formulation, implementation, and analysis. In the third essay (Chapter 4), the study estimates the effects of an Ag-PPP that sought to create a sustainable Business-to-Business linkage by offering multiple transfers and guarantees to farmers. Here, the economic benefits to farmers, created by the PPP to common bean producers in Uganda is evaluated. Ag-PPPs play critical role in agrarian societies where agriculture is the predominant sector in creating employment, generating GDP, and securing food supply. Findings show that by leveraging the potential to create synergies among actors, the PPP created positive outcomes for farmers and stimulated increased production from targeted interventions. The study documents evidence of a significant increase in sales and sales revenue due to increases in bean production. For example, PPP farmers were likely to report 209 Kg/hectare higher yield compared to non-PPP farmers. Also, PPP farmers were more likely to report positive quantities of production to allocated to the market. Public private partnerships have checks and balances which ensure that benefits are allocated fairly among actors. Thus, the occurrence of scenarios that could marginalize and impoverish the weakest actors, often farmers, is tremendously curtailed.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

In many developing countries, governments often use Minimum support prices (MSPs) as interventions to (i) safeguard farmers' income against crop price falls, and (ii) ensure sufficient and balanced production of different crops. In this paper, we examine two questions: (1) What is the impact of MSPs on the farmers' crop selection and production decisions, future crop availabilities, and farmers' expected profits? (2) What is the impact of strategic farmers on crop selection and production decisions, future crop availabilities, and farmers' expected profits? To explore these questions, we present a model in which the market consists of two types of farmers (with heterogeneous production costs): myopic farmers (who make their crop selection and production decisions based on recent market prices) and strategic farmers (who make their decisions by taking all other farmers' decisions into consideration). By examining the dynamic interactions among these farmers for the case when there are two (complementary or substitutable) crops for each farmer to select to grow, we obtain the following results. First, we show that, regardless of the values of the MSPs offered to the crops, the price disparity between the crops worsens as the complementarity between the crops increases. Second, we find that MSP is not always beneficial. In fact, offering MSP for a crop can hurt the profit of those farmers who grow that crop especially when the proportion of strategic farmers is sufficiently small. Third, a bad choice of MSPs can cause the expected quantity disparity between crops to worsen. By taking these two drawbacks of MSPs into consideration, we discuss ways to select effective MSPs that can improve farmers' expected profit and reduce quantity disparity between crops.