Hi Aziz, you’re welcome. Yes, there’s a lot of good ideas out there that needs to be tested and applied in real settings, and applying good quality science will certainly add value to what we do. The work that we do is certainly aimed to inform how we can do things better that will lead to desired outcomes. If research indeed does show that a practice has lots of potential to improve for example the food safety indicators that we track, then the next steps would be to understand how such practices can be adopted and scaled out so that the benefits are realized by more people, and especially those who need them most. New insights would be nice to have in the ‘how’ after we have generated compelling evidence to answer the ‘what/where/by whom’ questions, and both deserve equal attention, in my opinion.

Hi Saskia, greetings and thanks; I would love to visit South Africa again if there’s an opportunity! Yes, decisions to sell livestock will need to be viewed in the context of what role they play in the household’s portfolio of livelihood commodities. And you’re right; selling them for cash is only one of the functions they perform in smallholder settings. The response you got is rational from somebody who looks at livestock as an asset to save for future use in an emergency or a buffer to shocks, and may differ from somebody who raises livestock as a pure commercial enterprise. There is opportunity to inform this decision to sell by possibly illustrating how much potential income is foregone by not selling, the additional cost of feeding until the farmer decides to let go of their animals, and the expected benefit from having the animals to use during an emergency or to continue keeping them in the herd. System dynamics modeling may be a useful tool to examine this, if you are keen.

Catherine, for an introduction on that work you can start reading http://www.rural21.com/english/news/detail/article/linking-poor-livestock-keepers-to-markets-00001319/
the case of contract farming in pig is briefly described

Hi Catherine, greetings and thanks for your question. We used to do more work on vertical integration as they have been used in the pig sector and previous work have looked at how such types of institutional arrangements to address constraints by smallholders to market participation. We have papers on this available in Mahider, and if you need a specific paper, I’m happy to send you a copy if you let me know which one. What we found in that work is that vertical integration in principle can help address smallholder constraints to market access, but that effectiveness is hampered in the implementation part, where entry barriers to participation in out grower schemes, for example, are not surmountable to many smallholders. Some hybrid form of collective action and vertical integration may potentially work and would be worthwhile exploring in field experiments.

Hi Rupsha, greetings and thanks for your question. For recent work on pigs in Vietnam, institutional economics have helped shaped some of our analytical frameworks to answer questions about choices, e.g., on what to sell, where to sell, and the impacts of these choices on well-being (but mainly on profitability indicators). Hence, focus was looking at information and how information asymmetries are affecting decisions and their outcomes, and where are opportunities for introducing new or improving existing institutions, as well as organizational design. I can share with you some of previous papers we have from this body of work. What we would like to do more is to see how behavioral economics thinking could help in designing triggers or incentives to elicit the behavioral response that engenders the desired outcome, and could be tested in a natural experiment. This is also a new area of interest for me and would certainly be happy to continue the conversation with you, Rupsha.