Food prices, processing, and shocks: Evidence from rice and COVID-19.

Rice is the staple food for about half of the world's population and mills are the essential processing link between farmers and consumers, making rice milling one of the most important agro-processing sectors globally. This paper assesses changes in rice and paddy prices, and processing margins during the COVID-19 pandemic shock through the lens of rice mills in Myanmar. Our data, collected through telephone surveys with a large number of medium- and large-scale rice millers in September 2020, reveal significant disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, including transportation restrictions, employee lay-offs, and reduced operations relative to normal times. However, milling margins, and paddy and rice prices were mostly stable, showing only minor increases compared to 2019. Rice prices increased most for the varieties linked to export markets, though the gains were mostly passed through to farmers as higher paddy prices. Similarly, higher rice prices achieved by modern mills-due to extra processing-were mostly transmitted to producers. Our results also highlight the major importance of byproducts-broken rice and rice bran-sales to overall milling margins as byproduct sales allowed mill operators to sustain negative paddy-to-rice margins.

Showing pesticides' true colors: The effects of a farmer-to-farmer training program on pesticide knowledge.

Information plays an important role in technology adoption and behavior change. This may be particularly true for pesticide decisions, which affect farmer income, health, and the environment. Pesticide use is increasing, and farmers often have incomplete knowledge of how pesticides affect crop production and health. Researchers regularly recommend information interventions to improve pesticide knowledge. This study uses a randomized controlled trial of a pesticide training program in Zambia to identify the effects of information on farmer knowledge of both the health risks and the production benefits of pesticides. We use detailed knowledge assessments covering identification and interpretation of toxicity color labels, pest control properties, and exposure to reveal a more complete picture of pesticide knowledge and to identify where information can have the greatest impact. Our results show that training significantly improved farmer knowledge, particularly for the more complicated pesticide characteristics that are harder to learn from experience. We also find that more experienced farmers had worse prior knowledge of pesticide toxicity, though they also had larger increases from training. Overall, our results suggest that pesticide information interventions should focus on the pest control properties of pesticides and on showing pesticides' true colors through toxicity identification by color labels.

Impacts of COVID-19 on agricultural production and food systems in late transforming Southeast Asia: The case of Myanmar.

The objective of this contribution is to report the initial impacts of measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic on Myanmar's agri-food system. Myanmar is one of several late-transforming low-income countries in Southeast Asia where agriculture still plays a large role in rural livelihoods, and where food prices are a key factor affecting nutrition security for poor urban and rural households. Whereas the economic impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on tourism and manufacturing were obvious to policymakers, the impacts on the agri-food system were less evident and often more indirect. This resulted in the rural sector being allocated only a very small share of the government's initial fiscal response to mitigate the economic impacts of COVID-19. To correct this information gap, a suite of phone surveys covering a wide spectrum of actors in the agri-food system were deployed, including farm input suppliers, mechanization service providers, farmers, commodity traders, millers, food retailers and consumers. The surveys were repeated at regular intervals prior to and during the main crop production season which began shortly after nationwide COVID-19 prevention measures were implemented in April. While the results indicate considerable resilience in the agri-food system in response to the initial disruptions, persistent financial stress for a high proportion of households and agri-food system businesses indicate that the road to a full recovery will take time. The experience provides important lessons for strengthening the resilience of the agri-food system, and the livelihoods of households that depend on it.