Structural Changes in Smallholder Agriculture: A Comparison between Southeast Asia and Sub Saharan Africa

• Applicant: Priyanka Parvathi, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Agricultural Economics, Agricultural Policy, Agricultural Sociology
• Term: from 2017 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 392933254

Given that rural urban migration will continue to take place what then is the future of farming considering that 90 % of the farms in Asia and Africa are small-scale? Does structural change take place and if so, at what pace? The proposed research aims to investigate this question against the background of an intercontinental comparison namely Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). In both regions two countries will be selected. These will be Thailand and Vietnam for the former and Uganda and Nigeria from the latter. For all four countries, long-term panel data exist that strongly facilitates such analysis. For Thailand and Vietnam, a ten-year (2007 – 2016) household and village panel dataset exits under the DFG sponsored project Thailand-Vietnam Socioeconomic Panel (TVSEP). For Sub-Saharan Africa, the applicant will collaborate with the Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces (STAARS) project coordinated by Cornell University along with Wold Bank and other partners. She will also collaborate with International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI, Washington DC). World Bank has the dataset on SSA from Living Standards Measurement Study Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) established since 1980s. This dataset on Africa is used by STAARS project team and IFPRI. Thereby, using both TVSEP and LSMS-ISA datasets, this research will analyse the drivers, constraints and consequences of structural change in agriculture with emphasis on labour migration. The Asia-Africa comparison is expected to significantly improve the knowledge and understanding of transferring development concept from one context to another. It will be useful to extract lessons that African countries can learn from emerging economies like Thailand and Vietnam on transforming their agriculture. The possibility of drawing from two high quality panel datasets offers a unique opportunity for policy-relevant empirical research as well as testing and advancing methodologies.

• DFG Programme: Research Fellowships
• International Connection: USA
• Hosts: Professor Christopher Barrett, Ph.D.; Paul Dorosh, Ph.D.