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The impact of new Rice for Africa (NERICA) adoption on household food security and health in the Gambia

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Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of NERICA rice adoption on household food security and human health, using country-wide cross-sectional data of 502 rice farming households in The Gambia. We used food consumption scores and the number of household sick days per capita as outcome indicators of food security and health, respectively. The instrumental variable approach was used to identify causal effects of NERICA adoption on food security and health. We found significant differences in some key socio-economic and demographic characteristics between adopters and non-adopters of NERICA. To control for such differences and allow a causal interpretation of the impact of NERICA adoption, we estimated the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE). Our analyses indicated that adoption of NERICA significantly increased household food security by 14 percentage points. This helps severely food insecure households to achieve acceptable food security status by enabling them to acquire cereals and tubers, pulses, vegetables and fruits on a daily basis. However, there was no significant impact of NERICA adoption on human health. Our findings indicate that NERICA can play an important role in fighting against food insecurity in The Gambia.

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Notes

  1. The main respondent within each household was the person most knowledgeable and responsible for rice production activities. However, for specific modules of the questionnaire, the most appropriate person in the household was interviewed.

  2. For some researchers, the farmer’s first few years of cultivation of a variety is part of learning about the characteristics of the variety through experimentation.

  3. Rice growing communities were identified and selected by agents from agricultural extension services.

  4. In-kind credit in this study refers to the acquisition of NERICA seeds on credit.

  5. Observed characteristics are factors that have been carefully recorded or measured by the study.

  6. Unobserved characteristics are factors that are not or cannot be observed or measured by the study, such as the attitude of a family member toward farming.

  7. There is the possibility of some NERICA awareness spill-over to neighboring non-NERICA villages. Farmers in NERICA villages can give seeds or information about NERICA to their counterparts in non-NERICA villages which can create spill-over effects. This can lead to a problem referred to as non-compliance, which can be addressed by the Local Average Treatment Effect (LATE) estimator used in this study to assess the impact of NERICA adoption on food security and health.

  8. One cannot directly test whether a given instrument has fulfilled the above conditions, justification has to be based on evidence obtained from program design (World Bank 2010).

  9. Such a case is called unobserved essential heterogeneity by Heckman et al. (2006).

  10. It is assumed that the conditional probability of NERICA exposure P(d = 1 | x) is strictly between zero and 1 and that of NERICA potential adoption P(d 1  = 1 | x) is strictly positive for all values of x.

  11. Our initial approach was to interact all the variables with NERICA adoption but this led to multi-collinearity problems. As a result, interaction terms causing such problems were removed from the models.

  12. At the time of data collection for this study, only upland NERICA varieties were disseminated to rice farmers.

  13. Farmers acquire in-kind credit in the form of rice seeds from the extension service, which is repaid after harvest.

  14. There are empirical findings (Tanillari et al. 2014; Carney 1998) which show that male-headed households are more resource endowed as compared to female-headed households. This difference in resource endowment is likely to result in significant differences in food security status between these households. Hence, it is prudent to differentiate impacts of agricultural technology adoption on food security by gender of household head.

  15. Since the maximum food consumption score (FCS) for a household is 105, then a positive impact of 15 FCS translates into a 14% increase in food security.

  16. In addition to including gender as control variable in the specification of the LARF function and in the determinants of the probability of exposure, the probability of adoption, we use a Stata post-estimation command “predict”, which enabled the identification of gender impacts for male and female headed households.

  17. We calculate the caloric intake from the per capita rice consumption of 117 kg per annum (DCMI 2014)

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Global Rice Scholarship programme for financial assistance for the implementation of this study, as well as to the Africa Rice Center and University of Hohenheim for their technical assistance. We thank two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal for very useful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany

    Lamin Dibba & Manfred Zeller

  2. Africa Rice Centre, Cotonou, Benin

    Lamin Dibba

  3. National Agricultural Research Institute (NARI), Brikama, The, Gambia

    Lamin Dibba

  4. HarvestPlus, International Food and Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Kampala, Uganda

    Manfred Zeller

  5. Gaston Berger University, Saint-Loius, Senegal

    Aliou Diagne

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  1. Lamin Dibba
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  2. Manfred Zeller
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  3. Aliou Diagne
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Correspondence to Lamin Dibba.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 10 Determinants of exposure and NERICA potential adoption
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Dibba, L., Zeller, M. & Diagne, A. The impact of new Rice for Africa (NERICA) adoption on household food security and health in the Gambia. Food Sec. 9, 929–944 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-017-0715-x

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