IMEEL is currently being used in several projects:

The Contract Farming Project

Poor, rural farmers are often left out of the market because they face difficulties in competing with larger farmers who can provide firms with consistent quantities of high-quality products. Contract farming has proven to be an effective way to integrate farmers into the benefits of expanding domestic and international markets. However, the benefits of contract farming have thus far been concentrated in only a small segment of farmers—mainly medium-sized farmers and those who are more educated. Small farmers may be reluctant to commit to contracts because—at the time of sale—market prices may be higher than contract prices. This project proposes innovative contract structures that may open markets to small farmers of high-value crops in Bangladesh, Peru, Tanzania, and Vietnam. This project will first test stylized versions of the contracts in laboratory-type settings with representative farmers from local farm communities. These results will then be used to pin down exact details of the type of contract that appears to have the best chance of succeeding in the field.

The Rural Producers Organizations Project

Smallholders in Sub-Saharan Africa face pervasive market failure, which translates into missed opportunities and suboptimal economic behavior. Failure to procure inputs and market produce is often rooted in the lack of economies of scale. By engaging in markets collectively, smallholders can benefit from better market access. This supposes, however, that all group members commit a sufficient amount of their resources so that benefits from economies of scale can override the cost of running the organization. This in turn depends on each member’s expectation that others will honor their commitments. Over the past decade, many governments and donor agencies have shown renewed interest in Rural Producer Organizations (RPOs) as a means for Sub-Saharan African farmers to overcome market failure. Evidence shows, however, that many RPOs have so far had limited success. This project aims to identify specific interventions that can improve RPOs’ capacities by training leaders to elicit better member cooperation, or by offering incentives such as insurance or credit. Field work will be carried out in three countries from different regions of Africa: Senegal, Uganda, and Zambia.

Other Projects

• Financial rural–urban linkages: focuses on the supply and demand sides of (financial) rural–urban linkages such as remittances. A current study explores households’ income elasticity for remitting and the extent to which use of the remitted funds affects households’ willingness to remit.
• Social protection and insurance: considers the extent to which social protection in the form of insurance affects households’ willingness to undertake risks a priori and their ability to cope with risk ex post. Specifically, this research explores households’ willingness to pay for insurance, particularly, weather insurance.
• Social interactions, preferences and norms: focuses on the extent to which social norms and preferences affect behavior in (new) institutional environments. Simple games are used to study different types of strategic behavior in order to generalize to more complex environments. A recent study suggests that observing other people deviating from a norm of reciprocity makes an individual more likely to do so as well.