Farmer Participation in Supermarket Channels, Production Technology, and Efficiency: The Case of Vegetables in Kenya

Abstract

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Farmers’ preferences for supermarket contracts in Kenya

“…The most widespread supermarket chains in Kenya include Nakumatt, Uchumi, Tuskys, Naivas, and Ukwala, all of which are Kenyan owned. The spread of foreign owned supermarket chains has been limited in Kenya until now (Rao et al, 2012).…”

“…The sample was selected in 2008 through a stratified random sampling procedure (Rao and Qaim, 2011;Rao et al, 2012). Supermarket (SM) and traditional channel (TC) farmers were randomly selected from complete lists in 31 administrative locations within the County.…”

“…The experiment was designed such that the attributes closely resembled those in the actual contracts that supermarkets issue to vegetable farmers in Kiambu (see previous section). The surveys in 2008 and 2012 and the related analyses (Rao and Qaim, 2011;Rao et al, 2012;Andersson et al, 2015) were useful in designing the choice experiment that was conducted in 2015. In addition, several focus group discussions were carried out in Kiambu in late 2014 to understand farmers' views on different contract attributes in a qualitative way.…”

“…Contracted smallholders may benefit from higher and more stable prices, as well as better access to inputs, technology, and information (Berdegué et al, 2005;Sartorius and Kirsten, 2007;Blandon et al, 2009a;Barrett et al, 2012;Reardon and Timmer, 2014). Indeed, recent studies show that supermarket contracts have contributed to higher farm productivity and household welfare in some smallholder situations (Minten et al, 2009;Rao and Qaim, 2011;Rao et al, 2012;Michelson, 2013;Chege et al, 2015). However, some also show that smallholders are sometimes unable to participate in supermarket channels (Hernández et al, 2007;Neven et al, 2009), or they drop out of contracts for reasons that are not always entirely clear .…”

THE EFFECT OF AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION SERVICE ON THE TECHNICAL EFFICIENCY OF TEFF (<i>ERAGROSTISTEF</i>) PRODUCERS

“…However, this procedure is less suitable for nonlinear functions such as the stochastic frontier. We therefore use matching techniques similar to those of (Mayen et al, Science Publications AJAS 2010; Rao et al, 2012) to compare the TE of AE participant farms with similar non-participant farms. We employed a matching model known as Propensity Score Matching (PSM) (Smith and Todd, 2005;Caliendo and Kopeinig, 2008).…”