International Food Policy Research Institute

About: International Food Policy Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Agriculture & Food security. The organization has 1217 authors who have published 4952 publications receiving 218436 citations.

Ethiopian Agricultural Cooperatives in an Era of Global Commodity Exchange: Does Organisational Form Matter?

Abstract: In Ethiopia, agricultural cooperatives are expected to play a key role in linking smallholder farmers to the recently established commodity exchange system. Recent research has found, however, that the commercialisation levels of cooperative members do not differ significantly from those of non-member farmers in Ethiopia. We argue though that the impact of cooperative membership on commercialisation may vary significantly depending on the type of cooperative organisations considered. Applying propensity score matching as well as regression analysis to a set of farm household living in rural areas where the commodity exchange system was to become operational, we consistently find significantly higher commercialisation rates, when compared with non-member famers, for farmers belonging to marketing cooperatives. Livelihood cooperatives, on the other hand, appear to have insignificant or negative impact on Ethiopian farmers’ commercialisation. We conclude that the selective inclusion of marketing cooperatives in the commodity exchange system has the potential to simultaneously reduce the rural poverty and maximise agro-commodity commercialisation in Ethiopia.

The Impact of Nutrition during Early Childhood on Education among Guatemalan Adults

Abstract: Early childhood nutrition is thought to have important effects on education, broadly defined to include various forms of learning We advance beyond previous literature on the effect of early childhood nutrition on education in developing countries by using unique longitudinal data begun during a nutritional experiment during early childhood with educational outcomes measured in adulthood Estimating an intent-to-treat model capturing the effect of exposure to the intervention from birth to 36 months, our results indicate significantly positive, and fairly substantial, effects of the randomized nutrition intervention a quarter century after it ended: increased grade attainment by women (12 grades) via increased likelihood of completing primary school and some secondary school; speedier grade progression by women; a one-quarter SD increase in a test of reading comprehension with positive effects found for both women and men; and a one-quarter SD increase on nonverbal cognitive tests scores There is little evidence of heterogeneous impacts with the exception being that exposure to the intervention had a larger effect on grade attainment and reading comprehension scores for females in wealthier households The findings are robust to an array of alternative estimators of the standard errors and controls for sample attrition