Improving Agricultural Irrigation on the Balkhab River, Afghanistan

In Afghanistan, where 80% of the population is rural, irrigated agriculture is important for satisfying subsistence needs. While most of the irrigated agriculture is fed by diversion canal systems which tap surface flows, legal and physical water infrastructure in the region is generally poor. A math programming model is used to optimize irrigation strategies under different water-availability and policy scenarios. It is found that the construction of a reservoir could increase net revenues to a representative farming community by up to 30%. However, even greater benefits may result from increasing distribution efficiencies, depending on the initial level of conveyance losses. Further, property rights schemes may be implemented to distribute wealth more evenly through various zones at minimal cost to the agricultural community as a whole. These results may prove useful to policymakers or water authorities in reestablishing water rights.linear programming, irrigation, Afghanistan, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, International Development,

Conversations with non-choir farmers: Implications for conservation adoption. Report for the Walton Family Foundation

The following report documents the results and implications for the study, “Conversations with non-choir farmers: Implications for conservation adoption”. We conducted 10 in-person focus groups with farmers (IN=5; IA=3; IL=2) and three online focus groups with non-operating landowners (NOLs) who own land in Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa. This research sought to answer the following research questions: 1) What are viable strategies beyond what WFF is currently investing in to promote agricultural practices that that reduce nutrient runoff? 2) How and under what conditions can policies help to change farmer and landowner behavior? What are potential barriers, particularly resistance from the agricultural sector? 3) What do Corn Belt farmers think about the limits to voluntary conservation? Do they see a need to think beyond voluntary conservation? 4) What suggestions do Corn Belt farmers have for how to motivate wide-spread adoption of conservation practices to improve water quality? 5) How could new policies and incentives be tied to existing funding streams (e.g., Farm Bill) or other financial incentives? The focus group questions were designed to foster participants’ discussions of their perceptions on seven topics related to the research questions: 1) regulation; 2) conservation barriers; 3) market-based policies; 4) conservation targeting; 5) motivations for widespread conservation adoption; 6) communication networks; and 7) certification programs and private sector funding for conservation. The following pages include data from the 13 focus groups – 10 with farmers and 3 with NOLs. We conclude with implications of our findings

Using carbon offsets to fund agricultural conservation practices in a working-lands setting

The nitrogen cascade concept indicates that agriculture serves as a significant link between emissions of the potent greenhouse gas (GHG) nitrous oxide and losses of nitrate to surface waters. Conservation practices have the potential to exploit this link, as their implementation is found to reduce fluxes of GHGs and nonpoint source (NPS) water pollution. Several studies have recognized this link and have documented the potential to improve environmental quality through the use of programs which retire land, the funding for which can be offset by the sale of carbon credits. However, the ability to use land for both agricultural production and environmental conservation is important. As such, this study examines the intensely-farmed Wildcat Creek Watershed in West-Central Indiana to evaluate the potential for implementing agricultural conservation practices to reduce NPS water pollutants and fluxes of GHGs in a working-lands setting. The extent to which carbon pricing can affect practice implementation costs and the optimal distribution of these practices throughout the watershed is also explored. Results from this study indicate that carbon offsets can sharply reduce conservation practice implementation costs and therefore have the potential to reduce greater amounts of NPS pollution for a given cost of implementation. However, the extent to which various practices can be used to abate NPS pollutants and GHGs is heavily dependent on the implementation period considered. Further, this study found that fertilizer management, which is relatively difficult to enforce in practice, significantly influenced the optimal allocation of practices. This study provides a novel framework for analyzing the impacts of conservation practices that may prove useful in formulating innovative policy tools aimed at improving environmental quality in multiple environmental media. The findings of this study indicate that the potential exists to use carbon offsets to improve water quality and reduce GHG fluxes in a working-lands setting

Policy Tools for Managing Biological Pollution Risks from Trade

The spread of infectious livestock diseases can be considered a form of “biological pollution.” Prior literature asserts trade-related biological pollution externalities arise from trade in contaminated goods. However, this literature ignores (i) importers’ ability to reduce disease spillovers via private risk management choices and (ii) the potential for strategic interactions to arise when an importer’s risk management measures simultaneously protect himself and others. This paper explores the design of efficient disease prevention policies when importers can mitigate disease risks to others. We demonstrate that the biological pollution externality extends beyond trade-related activities—in contrast to prior work—and derive efficient policy incentives to internalize the externality. We also find spillovers between importers may be characterized by strategic complementarities, leading to multiple Nash-equilibrium levels of risk-mitigating activities. Additional command-and-control policies may also be needed alongside priced-based incentives to achieve efficiency in this case

Valuing Natural Resources Allocated by Dynamic Lottery

“Preference point” lotteries—under which the probability an individual is drawn increases with their stock of preference points earned over time by being unsuccessful in past drawings—are widely used to allocate access to many economically important natural resources (e.g., big game hunting opportunities). Lotteries form a natural choice experiment: by observing the opportunities for which an individual applies, the alternatives not chosen, the associated costs, the probability of winning a permit, etc., statistical inferences can be made about how individuals trade off site characteristics for cost. Knowledge of these trade-offs can then be used to estimate applicants’ willingness to pay for site quality characteristics and site access. Two key features of recreationalists’ choices under preference point lottery are (i) forward-looking behavior (since the odds of winning a permit depend on the accumulated stock of preference points) and (ii) equilibrium sorting (whereby individuals decide where to apply based on their expectations of others’ choices and vice versa). We develop a novel revealed preference method for estimating individuals’ willingness to pay for access to recreational opportunities allocated by preference point lottery that accounts for these two features. We apply our model to the case study of black bear hunting in Michigan. We estimate total willingness to pay for access to a small site to be nearly $150,000