Prof. Alain de Janvry, Professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley, will give a seminar on agricultural technology adoption at Trinity College. Agriculture is a key sector for development in much of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia where most of the world poor are located. To serve for development, agriculture must support a productivity revolution in staple foods, an agricultural transformation, a rural transformation, and finally a structural transformation. For this, technology adoption is key, yet has been lagging in these very regions. Why is this the case? This seminar will report on the results of a large study based at UC Berkeley and MIT, the Agricultural Technology Adoption Initiative, using field experiments as the main approach to establishing causality. It will show that achieving the desired role for agriculture requires greater efforts at customizing technology to heterogeneity of production conditions and at achieving coordination among ministries and service providers to address the many market failures constraining adoption.
This is a public event and all are welcome.