Central American countries, particularly Guatemala, are experiencing extreme climate events which are disproportionately affecting agriculture and subsequently rural livelihoods. Governments are taking action to address climatic threats, but they need tools to assess the impact of policies and interventions aiming to decrease the impacts of climate change on agriculture. This research, conducted with national policy makers and climate change and agriculture stakeholders in Guatemala, provides a comparative analysis of eight climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practices and technologies associated with the smallholder maize-beans production system in the Dry Corridor. The practices were identified as high-interest for investment by national stakeholders. CSA practices and technologies aim to improve food security, resilience, and low emissions development, where possible and appropriate. The paper assesses the cost-benefit profile of the introduction of CSA options into farm production systems. Indicators related to profitability and valuation of environmental and social externalities are used to assess options. Probabilistic cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is used to address field variability and high uncertainty around parameter values. All practices except one were profitable over their lifecycle, with some practices, expected to be ideal for drought prone areas, presenting a higher risk for adoption. The results were discussed with national stakeholders who established best-bet CSA investment portfolios. This paper argues that a thorough understanding of the costs and benefits of potential CSA options is needed to channel investments effectively and efficiently towards both short- and long-term interventions and should be coupled with broader assessment of tradeoffs between CSA outcomes. (Résumé d'auteur

This paper summarises research into factors contributing to low levels of adoption of improved maize varieties in Honduras. Empirical analysis was based on an agricultural household model which explicitly incorporates variety characteristics into the household's optimisation process. We considered a multitude of production and consumption characteristics valued by farmers, as well as an array of household socioeconomic characteristics and measures of village-specific marketing costs. Empirical results indicated that marketing costs and production characteristics are important explanators of variety choice, whereas consumption characteristics are not, and that information deficits may be an important limiting factor to adoption of improved varieties.

Recent studies highlight a growing concern over the limited adoption of climate smart agricultural (CSA) practices despite their potential benefits on adaptation, mitigation and productivity. Literature indicates several factors behind the lack of adoption including socio-demographic and economic conditions, agro-ecological scales and the nature of the practices. This paper examines to what extent and under which conditions such factors influence the adoption of CSA practices at farm, household and community level across three study sites in different continents: Vietnam, Nicaragua and Uganda. While cost benefit analysis (CBA) is employed to assess the farm-level profitability of CSA practices, the aggregate community impact disaggregated by different groups of farmer typologies with specific socio-economic features is derived from the adoption rate estimated by the relative advantage of practices and the income level of each group. Our main findings show great variation of farm-profitability of CSA practices across scales. Similar practices could generate different profitability depending on crop typologies, input access and prices, household types and local context. Regarding the aggregate profitability of CSA practices at regional scale, we found that under particular conditions, relevant factors of adoption matter to the adoption pattern and thereby affects the ranking. Such conditions include (i) high income inequality, (ii) large profitability gap of prioritized CSA practices, and (iii) large proportion of cost and benefit of the practices in the level of income. This study contributes to enhancing the prioritization process of CSA practices and provides practical guidance for research and policy to tailor the investment to appropriate end-users to assure the greatest impact for the community.

Price policy discrimination against agricultural producers, in order to provide cheap food for urban consumers, has been widely cited in development forums as a cause of agricultural stagnation. Evidence is presented that suggests no consistent pattern of discrimination against producers for a major food commodity, wheat. However, consumer subsidies and trade policies have reduced bread prices to urban consumers in many countries. Price data from the early 1980s are assembled for thirty-one developing countries. Nominal protection coefficients for producers and consumers at official and corrected exchange rates and wheat-fertilizer price ratios are estimated for each country.

General fertilizer response models are useful to derive robust rec· ommendations for farmers who face different circumstances. This pap,er shows that a flexible functional form such as the transcendental cun be applied to develop both agronomically and economically sound n~ommendation tables using a set of soil test, climate, and management variables. Data from thirty-eight experiments on wh1:at response to N and P in the Humid Pampa, Argentina, were used to build a general response model that incorporates the initial level! of soil test measures (N0 3 -N and Bray-1 P), rainfall from sowing to maturity, and previous crop. The economic analysis was performed for relevant nutrient/grain price ratios r. = 8.0 and r. = 18.3 for N and P, respectively. A table of fertilizer recommendations for wheat was derived for different combinations of rainfall expectations, previous crop, and soil test values. The following results were obtained: (i) the esti· mated model not only accounted for a significant perce1~tage of the total variability in the dependent variable (lnY), with R" = 0.56, P G.E. Sain, Economics Program, Int. Maize and Wb~at Improvement Ctr. (CIMMYT), Lisboa 27, Col. Juarez, Deleg. Cuauhtemoc, Apdo. Postal 6-641, 06600 Mexico, DF, Mexio); and M.A. Jauregui, Published in Agron. J. 85:934-937 (1993).