Rui Benfica

Assessing environmental and social burdens in agrifood systems: Insights from Colombia and Peru

Agrifood systems (AFS) in Colombia and Peru generate substantial economic value but also impose significant environmental and social externalities that remain unpriced and largely invisible in policy and market decisions. Using the Global Impact Database (GID) and a True Cost Accounting (TCA) framework, this paper quantifies the hidden costs embedded in 19 AFS sectors, with a focus on seven major crop sectors. As one of the first cross-country applications of GID data in Latin America, the analysis offers a harmonized and comprehensive assessment of the true costs of food production, processing, and distribution. Results show that externalities are equivalent to 12 percent of AFS output in Colombia and 13 percent in Peru—a substantial burden that is not captured by conventional economic indicators. Environmental externalities dominate in both countries, driven primarily by land occupation, climate change, air pollution, and use of scarce water. Social externalities—especially underpayment, child labor, and gender wage gaps—are smaller in aggregate but become markedly more significant within crop sectors, as labor intensity and informality characterize production systems. Livestock, dairy, and bovine meat products consistently emerge as the most externality‑intensive sectors, while cereals, rice, sugarcane, oilseeds, and fruits and vegetables exhibit comparatively lower externality costs. Value‑chain decomposition shows that most externalities originate at the production stage (at farm level). These findings highlight several clear leverage points for targeted policy and investment: reducing environmental pressures in livestock systems, improving labor conditions in crop sectors, and integrating TCA metrics into national planning and sustainability strategies. Making the hidden costs visible is essential for advancing more sustainable, equitable, inclusive, and resilient food systems in Colombia and Peru.

Assessing the development impacts of bio-innovations: The case of genetically modified maize and cassava in Tanzania

Seeds of change: The impact of Ethiopia's direct seed marketing approach on smallholders' seed purchases and productivity

While multiple factors explain low adoption rates of improved varieties by small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, a key supply-side constraint is the limited availability of seed embodying new traits in the volume, quality, price, and timeliness required by farmers. This constraint is partly attributable to classical failures in the market for seeds and traits. Historically, governments have remedied this failure by allocating public resources to varietal improvement and seed distribution. In 2011, the Government of Ethiopia launched a novel experiment—the direct seed marketing approach—to encourage private seed investment in the country's seed system and to reduce the state's footprint in the system. Direct seed marketing incentivized seed companies to sell directly to farmers rather than through state distribution channels. This study provides the first quantitative assessment of the impact of direct seed marketing based on key indicators of a robust seed system: access to seed and farm-level productivity. Using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences approach suitable to handling variation in treatment timing, we find that direct seed marketing increased the share of farmers purchasing fresh maize seed by 15 percentage points. It also raised the quantity of maize seed purchased by 45% and improved maize yields by 18%. In contrast, direct seed marketing had no effect on wheat seed purchases and yields. These crop-specific differences likely reflect underlying differences in the reproductive biology of maize and wheat, highlighting the importance of crop-specific policy design, institutional arrangements, and market development strategies to accelerate the adoption of improved varieties.