Why do they matter? Fish and McD's

Pinstrup-Anderson, co-author on my textbook, recently asked what fish have to do with food and nutrition security. He answers that it matters a great deal and recommends a new report by a high-level panel of experts on the subject.

The current debate and the many papers written recently about how agriculture can be made more nutrition sensitive also miss the point.  We should talk about how the food system, including fisheries and aquaculture and the total supply chain, can be made more nutrition sensitive.  If we limit the discussion and policy recommendations to agriculture, we are foregoing some very big opportunities for improving food security and nutrition. ... 

The report, which is available at www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe or in hardcopy from cfs-hlpe@fao.org, is a goldmine of policy-related knowledge about the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, their importance, sustainability issues, governance and recommended policies for consideration by governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the interaction between the fisheries and aquaculture sector and food and nutrition security. The report is a must-read for those of us interested in food policy.

Handjiski points out that all of Sub-Saharan Africa only has two countries with McDonald's franchises. Even though countries like Seychelles, E. Guinea, Gabon, Botswana, and good old Nigeria have a higher income than Indonesia, Egypt, Pakiston, or Moldova did when they got their first. He suggests that, since having a McDonald's requires a certain level of infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and access to a large number of ingredients, it can be a development indicator:

In almost 60 percent of cases, developing countries grew [significantly] faster in the five years, compared to the previous five, following the opening of the first McDonald’s. ... What this means is that McDonald’s may be viewed as one of the tipping points for when a country has amassed sufficient urban middle-class, investment security and supply chains for economic take off.

 Speaking of which, there was also a recent article about how Americans' general stupidity with fractions stopped A&W from beating McDonald's Quarter Pounder with a "Third Pounder". People said 3 is less than 4 and therefore 1/3 is less than 1/4. Ouch. In related interesting news, New York states has decided that a burrito is a sandwich for tax purposes.

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Big Bag of Ethical Endorsements

Tabarrok endorses GiveWell's endorsement of the Against Malaria Foundation as a good charity to give money to. This sparked a debate in the comments about whether you should really give money to just one charity or to many and why we give in the first place. One argument (Landsburg's) says that if your contribution is small relative to the size of their total budget and if you are primarily seeking to do the most good with your money, you should only invest in one charity. Your small donation won't run into diminishing marginal returns, so there's no reason to diversify. On  the other hand, if you are concerned about other things, you may want to do something else:

• if I receive increasing marginal utility to the number of organizations I give to (up to a point), then I'd rather give a small amount to several organizations than a larger amount to only one; [translation: I feel like I'm a better human being because I give to 10 organizations than if I only donated to one]
• if I am uncertain which problem is the worst, it makes sense to donate to several organizations working on different problems (say, measles, climate change, and gender discrimination); [Note: if this is your difficulty, you might want to check out the Copenhagen Consensus, whose Nobel Laureate panel agreed child hunger was global problem #1)

Boudreaux meanwhile endorses Caplan on the perceived moral difference between nepotism and nationalism:

Despite its mighty evolutionary basis, almost everyone recognizes moral strictures against familial favoritism.  Almost everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. ...
Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups.  Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians?  Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads.  Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants?  Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs” in a self-righteous tone, then bask in the admiration of your fellow citizens.

Yglesias endorses cash donations, even as a way to teach children about the value of giving well:

Food drives do teach a lot of valuable lessons to kids. Until, that is, you learn that giving $10 will buy twenty times as much food for poor people aswould donating $10 worth of canned goods. Once you actually know the facts, then all it seems like you're doing is teaching kids to be too lazy to scrutinize the world. ... We shouldn't be teaching kids that it's okay to be indifferent between helping one family and helping twenty families. It's a huge difference!

Cook endorses de Tocqueville:

The greatest advantage of religion is to inspire … principles. There is no religion which does not place the object of man’s desires above and beyond the treasure of earth, and which does not naturally raise his soul to regions far above those of the senses.

Because in part that is my tradition as well, I wondered at Wronging Rights  perceiving religion solely as being in conflict with human rights. I pointed out in my comments that this in part stems from a confusion about what is meant by "religion". I wrote in part:

Food Policy in Disarray

Three videos are now up from IFPRI on the topic. Sadly my internet connection won't let me watch them, but given one of the speakers is my mentor, friend, and coauthor, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, they are certain to be worth watching.

Food Policy for Developing Countries

I just got my advance copy of my textbook with Per Pinstrup-Andersen. Happy birthday to me! I am exceptionally excited to see this final, polished, beautiful book in my hands. I am also thrilled with the early praise:

"Food Policy for Developing Countries is a comprehensive and deeply insightful guide that will be of great practical value to policymakers, analysts, and students of food policy. It is a worthy capstone contribution that reflects the wealth of knowledge built up over the senior author's long and eminent career, and it should serve as the seminal work on this topic for years to come." -- Benjamin Senauer, University of Minnesota, coauthor of Ending Hunger in Our Lifetime: Food Security and Globalization


"Per Pinstrup-Andersen and Derrill D. Watson II serve up a rich multidisciplinary diet of insights into the incidence, causes, and cures for hunger in developing countries. The exceptional insights dished out by these authors known for their long practical and scholarly experience needs to be savored and digested by every student of food policy for the poor." -- Luther Tweeten, Emeritus Chaired Professor, The Ohio State University

"Per Pinstrup-Andersen and Derrill D. Watson II give us a comprehensive road map for understanding how governments and markets are shaping food outcomes in the developing world. The book provides food policy analysts with a sound political-economy foundation, international data on everything from sustainable farming to consumer food safety, and a complete set of recent and vivid stakeholder-based case studies. I have used the case studies to great advantage in my own classroom. At a moment when interest in global food policy is peaking, this is the book to read." -- Robert Paarlberg, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

Amazon tells me the book is scheduled for release there by Nov 24. Copies will be in the Cornell Bookstore well before that for this semester, though. I know that Cornell University Press is also trying to get interested faculty at other institutions textbooks as quickly as possible.

The proof is in the publisher

The final proofs of the food policy textbook are off to the publisher. Huzzah!

OXFAM Reactions

The headline from Oxfam's GROW initiative, started yesterday, is their prediction that food prices will double by 2030. I imagine someone might have predicted much the same about the year 2000 in 1975 at the tail end of the last major food price crisis. I hope they are equally as wrong. Even if they are not equally wrong, there is little doubt that they are trying to estimate something with an enormous standard error looking at it from this far back, says Bellemare.

Matt at Aid Thoughts:

Of course, while Oxfam may believe this prediction now, they are trying to change behaviour so it doesn’t come true – this means that the claims will be incredibly difficult to (dis)prove. If food prices happen to double in 20 years, Oxfam will say “Look! We told you so.” If they don’t, they will say “Look at the disaster we averted!” Either way, the winning narrative will be constructed ex-post.

Evans thinks that the kind of holistic, systems-approach Oxfam is taking is the right way to go, as indeed our textbook says policy analysts need to think:

This isn’t just a campaign about biofuels, or landgrabs, or making agricultural trade fair, or climate change, or competition for land and water, or women’s rights. It’s about all these things, united beneath the overall banner of ‘food justice in a resource constrained world’. I’ve felt for ages that NGOs need to move on from single issue campaigning towards ways of pushing for whole system change – and Oxfam are going for it in a big way.

The report is upfront about some of the political economy challenges their proposed changes will face, but not enough is said about how to change the incentives of the "vested interests" (you may also know them as "stakeholder groups," depending on your ideology), says Ranil, who is also skeptical about putting quite so much faith in smallholder-led growth. Ranil also thinks they aren't being all that holistic, focusing too much on agriculture and not enough on growth in the rest of the economy.

Former Brazilian President da Silva puts his faith in the benevolence of governments: "If the political will is there no one will be denied their fundamental human right to be free from hunger."

Five Second: Economist on the new food regime; Part 3

If I had realized I was so close to finishing this, it would have only been a two part blog post. Oh well.

Companies have invested four times as much in maize as in wheat, and yields have accordingly increased twice as fast. This article discusses possible advances being worked on in wheat. “It is a long shot, but by 2050 wheat plants could be making their own fertilizer…”

One potential downside of the full-costing/polluter pays/payment for environment services approach we advocate in our upcoming textbook:

If there were a real carbon price, farmers would think of their fields in terms of the carbon embodied in crops and soil. That in turn would influence what they grow (elephant grass, perhaps, rather than wheat). And they would have to decide not just which crops to plant but whether to use them for food, carbon capture or things like bio-industrial raw materials. Competition for crops is already a problem, and likely to get worse.

The Economist concludes on an upbeat note: “There are plenty of reasons to worry about food: uncertain politics, volatile prices, hunger amid plenty. Yet when all is said and done, the world is at the start of a new agricultural revolution that could, for the first time ever, feed all mankind adequately.”

Who likes high food prices?

While explaining his views to a commenter, Sumner said, “By the way, the media never reports on the fact that the poorest people in the third world are mostly farmers. How do you think they feel about the high food prices?”

Here is some of the back and forth we had on the subject:


1 – Net-sellers of food like the new higher prices, but more than 75% and in some cases more than 90% of the farmers in many countries purchase more food than they sell. Most of them were hit hard during the last food crisis.
2 – Food prices is an aggregate. What matters are individual food prices because “farmers” don’t produce food baskets, but individual commodities. Last time around it was staple foods that saw most of the movement, this time it’s meat and sugar that are moving fastest. They have different impacts on the poorest.
Put those fun facts together and it gets really complicated. Yes, the media can’t handle that. Here is what I wrote about QE2 and food prices a couple weeks ago. Another post on the new peak in food prices from last month.

Sumner: Doesn’t that mean city dwellers sell more food than they buy? That seems very odd. Where do farmers get the income to buy food, if not from selling food? BTW, I’d include commodities such as cotton, which are also soaring in price.

Large farmers can sell a great deal to feed both the urban and rural. Don’t forget also the large farmers from the US who are so graciously subsidized so they can sell or have food aid sent to the poorer populations.
I quote from a CGIAR draft publication from 2008 [which I just happened to be reading that day]:

China vs. America rap

The rap's video and performance are a bit glaring, but it hits on a lot of the important topics.

Yglesias makes some very relevant comments, which seem all the more relevant since I finished re-editing the international trade chapter in my upcoming textbook this week by adding a section talking about this:

... any trade-related issues as a question of “China” versus “America” is always misleading. Industry employes just 27 percent of China’s workforce. Almost 40 percent of Chinese workers are laboring in agriculture, together producing only 10 percent of China’s GDP and thus being quite poor. These people do not benefit from an undervalued RMB. On the contrary, the low price of the RMB further depresses the value of their already meager earnings. The main beneficiares of the cheap yuan are the owners of China’s exporting enterprises, and the people who work at our supply those enterprises. This, however, isn’t “China” it’s a particular set of politically influential Chinee people who have a dominant voice in China’s economic policy.
America has a bizarre cotton policy. But that’s not because “America” has decided that this policy is good for “America,” it’s because cotton-growers control the relevant levers of power.

Video below the fold.

African Agriculture: Chicken Imports, Bananas, and Bangladesh Land Grab

The Bangladesh government joins the group of countries purchasing and leasing land in Africa to grow food for home. They have contacted governments in west Africa (Ghana, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, and Liberia). Unlike many other "land grab" proposals, these appear to promise a 50/50 split of food grown so that if Bangladeshi investments can double yields, it is possible for the countries to increase their food availability. As I highlight in my upcoming food policy textbook, cereal yields in west Africa are still more than half what they are in other regions of the world so such a large increase is possible.

Zimbabwe's chicken farmers are upset that the government lifted the temporary ban on chicken imports. Most of the imports come from Brazil and South Africa, which farmers claim heavily subsidize their chicken industries. One kg of chicken costs only $1 to raise in Brazil, but about $2.85 in Zimbabwe which forgoes the use of GMO-inputs. Local chicken sells for roughly $4-5 per kg while the imported chicken goes for $2/kg. The Zimbabwe Poultry Association head complains that "the problem is" lack of government price fixing to prevent retailers from raising the prices on local chickens, which cost much less at wholesale than retail and unfair dumping. Unmentioned are ways government could reduce local costs, help chicken farmers move into other industries, or support both farmers and consumers. Most of what he would like to see happen would benefit producers at the expense of consumers and pit one group of producers against another.

An article praises the benefits of banana culture research and constructing a center to provide marketing and extension services in central Kenya.

Lit in Review: Food System Holisticity

In chapter one of Per and my upcoming food policy textbook, we discuss the importance of considering the food system as a holistic system. Here are two papers that try to take one just what that means and why it's important

Richard Levins (2000) "The Food System: A Holistic Policy Approach" (working paper)
Levins puts forward a very simple model of a three sector food system with farmers who buy from an input sector and sell to a processing sector. Total profits are divided among the three sectors. Government support for farmers can be readily appropriated by any of the three sectors. To the extent that policies foster a competitive farming sector and non-competitive processing and input sectors, government support is likely to go mostly to the other two sectors. The basic policy implication he draws from this is that governments should either increase the competition faced by and in the other sectors or decrease the competition faced by farmers to strengthen farmers' relative position.

Byerlee, Jayne, and Myers (2006), "Managing food price risks and instability in a liberalizing market environment: Overview and policy options," Food Policy 31, 275-87 (ungated)

Their findings on food price variability in the run up to the recent food price spike are important. They found "no evidence that variability has increased" but warn that food system changes "may induce higher and more unstable prices in the future." Dealing with price variability, they argue, needs to be done holistically - that is, consider the impacts of price policies on economic growth, poverty reduction, and food security and incorporate the political economy of the food system by balancing market failure and government failure.
They argue that the role of government in the food system depends on what the rest of the food system looks like. As the food system changes, policy and policy system need to change with them: "Especially in Asia, conditions that motivated direct government involvement have changed as markets and infrastructure have developed... Many countries seem stuck in a vicious cycle in which under-provision of public goods hinders market development which, in turn, is used to justify continued government intervention. ... Such "half-way" reforms may create the worst of all possible worlds."
They end by detailing five different paths governments might take to manage food price variability:  encouraging more movement to market systems, building long-run capacity in private markets, direct intervention, encouraging market-based instrument to manage risk, and safety nets. Overall, transparency, efficient management of public resources, rules-based rather than discretionary policy, and active participation from many participants and stakeholder groups are encouraged and advocated. "Particular attention should be given to sequencing reforms... "second-best" outcomes will be the norm."

Fertilizer Subsidies in Ghana: Politics Matter

A new IFPRI publication discusses Ghana's 2008 fertilizer subsidy program, enacted while fertilizer prices rose 35%:

Governments previously overlooked other aspects of agricultural development, such as improved infrastructure, in favor of costly universal subsidies, and fertilizer was distributed through centralized state monopolies that crowded out private importers and sellers. A more sustainable approach to the role of subsidies in agricultural development calls for temporary vouchers that target smallholder farmers, cultivate demand for private retailers, and exploit the efficiency of private markets.
... The pattern of voucher allocations was not determined by a district’s poverty level. In fact, slightly more vouchers were granted to less-poor districts, which may have undermined the subsidy program by displacing unsubsidized purchases.
A closer examination reveals that the government targeted vouchers toward districts in which the ruling party was defeated in the last election. A district received 2 percent more vouchers for each percentage point by which the party had lost ... The vouchers were apparently wielded to bolster the party’s popularity where it was lacking....
Banful warns that without a mechanism to curtail political misuse, the new subsidies advancing across Africa will likely fall short of their potential to help farmers and stimulate agricultural productivity.

As we discuss in our forthcoming textbook on global food policy, policies are enacted for a variety of reasons to benefit a variety of causes. Is the relevant policy choice between a program that reduces poverty less efficiently and one that reduces poverty more efficiently, or is it between a program that reduces poverty and no program altogether? Efficiency cannot be determined without reference to the goal: improve electoral chances? reduce poverty? increase production? promote long-run fertilizer markets? reduce hunger? keep urban wages low? some combination of all the above?

A good day at work

Our textbook on global food policy is so close to turning in (admittedly for editor review) that I can taste it. Just one more week of editing and proofing citations....

Goal Posts in Education

I mentioned earlier, and discuss in my forthcoming book on food policy, that one of the great questions in determining what policies are effective or efficient is understanding what your goal is. Will agriculture policy be effective if fewer people are hungry, if farmer income went up, or if Senator Ruralstate gets reelected? Sumner is kindly pointing out this fact in education as well to Yglesias, who:

makes the following observation:

The choice program does seem to lead to a lot of consumer satisfaction, but not actual improvements in performance.

In other words, actual parents like the results, and are trying to get their kids into the program, but central planners don’t like the results. ... So the voucher program achieved the same learning objectives at a lower cost, or more bang for the buck.  Since when is that regarded as failure? ...

I’d rather judge the program on how well it actually did, using the standard economic criteria of costs and perceived customer benefits, not the single criterion used by central planners. If a policy that leads to greater consumer satisfaction at lower cost, and produces no negative side-effects in test scores, is viewed as a “failure” by progressives, then I don’t think we need to worry very much when progressives criticize the free market. 

Which of these is not a joke?

1 - Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka. -- Topeka's Blog

2 - Harvard has decided to auction off 100 slots in next year's freshman class to the highest bidders. - Mankiw

3 - Blattman tells us to "Ask not what you can do for poor African children, but what poor African children can do for you."



4 - The Heritage Foundation is the originator of ObamaCare. - Sumner

5 - Let's turn the London subway into a super hadron collider. - The Independent

6 - Bill Easterly is ready to retire Aid Watch. The problem is solved.

Revealed Food Preference: A Tangled Web

Time for me to demonstrate why they call it a degree in the PHilosophy of economics. In part, this is an esoteric problem that very few people should care about. In part, it's fundamental to what we as economists can say about the world based on the data we have available. Last week I learned that the relationship between what I buy at the store, what I would say on a survey are my food preferences, what I would tell a bunch of Econ101 students about my food demand, and what shows up in experimental data as my food preferences all give very different answers to my food preferences. Even if we are careful about definitions, it's a terrible mess.

... Edit Update: I spoke to the experimenters and decided that I couldn't describe the economic lessons I wanted to without potentially compromising their future runs if a future test subject read my post. I will re-post it when the sessions have ended, which should be before the summer.

Another Case: Monsanto Edition

Just another case of The Man sticking it to Corporate America?

Monsanto is currently under scrutiny for anti-competitive behavior. Currently they are only opening a forum for Monsanto critics - of which there are many - to voice their dissatisfaction:

Justice's tight-lipped antitrust division is taking the unusual step of inviting competitors, farmers, politicians and activists to air any gripes about Monsanto—and to suggest ways to limit the company's reach before a high-profile audience.

This is an interesting step. Can you imagine inviting Apple and computer retailers to a workshop discussing Microsoft, or Pepsi to discuss Coke? Tell us, Steve Jobs, how you would like to see Microsoft hampered.

I don't imagine many of the smallholder farmers in developing countries will be invited to attend in person or in proxy.

On a purely "this is a really big company that controls an immense amount of national and global seed production and distribution" level, there's probably a pretty good case to be made and I'm pleased to know that some scrutiny is under way ... this just seems an odd way to go about it.

On the other hand, it plays to the militant anti-biotech crowd - an opportunity not to discuss the merits of one company's actions, but the benefits of the industry as a whole, which could be very damaging to smallholders, the world's hungry, and the environment in the long run. Whatever the Justice Department decides to do will have impacts beyond our shores, but I doubt they will be taken into consideration.

Pastoralist Rain Insurance

In one of the case studies for my food policy book, Hazell discusses the difficulties of providing insurance for migratory pastoralists in eastern Africa. Among the primary difficulties are that the risk is highly covariate - if it hits one person in an area, it hits them all - making it difficult for private insurers to function without risking going under; and there are serious moral hazard problems involved in public insurance - there's not enough incentive to take precautions to avoid environmental or disease damage, for instance, increasing the cost of the program to the public.

So the idea has been floating around for some time (and in the case study) to set up an insurance scheme not based on livestock deaths, but on rainfall or grass production. ILRI, the International Livestock Research Institute, started up an initiative to do just that in Northern Kenya just a couple weeks ago. Here is their video about it:



Jan de Leeuw, one of ILRI's researchers, was visiting Cornell today, so I got to speak with him a little about it. While it's not his team's project, he mentioned that they are working through a local insurance company with an international re-insurer to protect the local company.

Among the interesting things to study in the months and years ahead during this project that we talked about was understanding whether people who buy the insurance increase the size of their herds (because the downside risk of losing them is lower) or decrease the size of their herds (because they aren't as needed for precautionary savings), and what the non-insured do. If insured people decrease the size of their herds, it might encourage the non-insured to increase the size of theirs, keeping up the potential for tragedies of the commons. We'll keep our fingers crossed.

Lit in Review: Integrated Soil Fertility in Malawi

Sauer and Tchale (2009), "The Economics of Soil Fertility Management in Malawi," Review of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 31, No. 3, p. 535-560

Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) uses both organic and inorganic methods to improve soil quality, such as dual cropping complementary crops that can fertilize other and improved following. Sauer and Tchale (2009) review eight studies and produce another one demonstrating that ISFM provides greater productivity, profits, and sustainbility than chemical fertilizers alone for African smallholder farmers.

Maize yields in Malawi -- the subject of three of the case studies for our new Food Policy book: count em, one, two, three -- have been highly dependent on fertilizer prices and government policies. At the turn of the century, government policies had done a great deal to limit the growth of the private fertilizer market. Sauer and Tchale explain that "gertilizer dealers require substantial risk premiums to hold and transport fertilizer in an inflationary economy," and the increasing prices for fertilizer from reduced subsidies, devalued currency, and rising world prices have hurt demand for fertilizer greatly. So Integrated Soil Fertility Management (ISFM) is likely to do substantially better in Malawi relative to inorganic fertilizers only, than it would in other places.

In their study, they find that inorganic fertilizers have a return to scale of 0.5, compared with 2.5 for ISFM; ISFM improved maize yield by 8-9 percent in two areas and 3 percent in a third region. If you include the value of the other crops planted at the same time to fertilize the ground (groundnuts, soy, and pigeon peas), the yield increases. ISFM also significantly increases the marginal value of fertilizer. So supporting ISFM can reduce the government burden of fertilizer subsidies while increasing sustainability, incomes, and food security.

Lit in Review: Behavioral fertilizer subsidies

Duflo, Kremer, and Robinson have an excellent working paper out, "Nudging Farmers to Use Fertilizer: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Kenya." Being a Duflo paper, you know this will be experimental economics. There is also a behavioral model, a couple regressions behind the scenes, and some calibration of the model based on the experiments.

The gains from using even small amounts of fertilizer are enormous - 70% per year in actual western Kenyan conditions they estimate in another paper - but utilization remains limited. The usual policy solution to this problem has been heavy input subsidies: India spends 0.75% of GDP on them and Zambia spends almost 2% of the government budget on them, for instance.

Among the problems with these subsidies are that they tend to benefit wealthier farmers more than poor and the political connected more than the marginalized, promote overuse, promote further government intervention, and are a strain on the budget. The removal of Malawi's subsidies happened to coincide with a drought and several other bad things, so fertilizer subsidies got a big boost. But is there a better way?

Duflo, Kremer, and Robinson use a model from behavioral economics that assumes that some people are more patient than others and we tend to overestimate just how patient we are (stochastic hyperbolic discounting is the official term). Patient people save and invest in fertilizer, impatient people never intend to, but these stochastically hyperbolic discounters who think they are patient intend to save, but may or may not invest in fertilizer when the time comes. There's a fair amount of evidence from the behavioral literature that this affects westerners, so why not people in developing countries also? In fact, their pre-intervention statistics show that a large number of farmers switch back and forth between using fertilizer and not using it.

Among the difficulties farmers face is that it's a 30 minute hike to go get the fertilizer. So they sent a field officer round to the farms with an offer to buy a fertilizer voucher at the regular price, but with free delivery. They could pay in cash (66% did) or in maize.

They find:

• About 16% are patient, 13% impatient, and 71% are more interesting.
• This temporary delivery subsidy (quite small, really) at the time of harvest is enough to get the interesting people to commit their savings to fertilizer, avoiding the time inconsistency problem. Fertilizer use is increased 46-60%
• Offering free delivery AND a 50% subsidy later in the year also increases fertilizer use, but by less and at a higher cost.
• "The calibration suggests that a 'paternalistic libertarian' approach of small, time-limited discounts could yield higher welfare than either laissez faire policies or heavy subsidies."

They mention that other policies might get similar results, such as a fine-tuned subsidy [yeah, good luck getting that out of the political process!] and improved financial access so they have a "soft commitment" to fertilizer purchase, but could get their money out if they needed it [but you need the financial infrastructure to do it.]