Kiel Working Papers, Kiel Institute for World Economics
No 1816:
Organic Certification, Agro-Ecological Practices and Return on Investment: Farm Level Evidence from Ghana
Linda Kleemann and Awudu Abdulai
Abstract: The recent empirical literature on economic sustainability
of certified export crops shows that certification standards that enhance
yields are important for improving farm revenues and farmer welfare.
However, limited evidence exists on the impact of organic certification on
the adoption of agro-ecological practices. In this study, we use unique
farm-level data from Ghana to examine the impact of organic certification
on the use of agro-ecological practices to improve environmental
conditions, as well as how using these measures affect farm outcomes such
as return on investment. In the former, we utilize an endogenous switching
regression approach to account for selection bias due to unobservable
factors. Our empirical results reveal that organic certification increases
agro-ecological practice use, although from a very low starting point.
Using a generalized propensity score approach, we show that there is a
nonlinear relationship between the intensity of agro-ecological practice
use and return on investment
Keywords: organic agriculture, certification, agro-ecological practices, return on investment, impact assessment; (follow links to similar papers)
JEL-Codes: O13,; Q13,; Q17,; Q56; (follow links to similar papers)
36 pages, December 2012
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