The Future of Smallholder Farming in Eastern Africa - Uganda ...

Obviously, they then are subject to interseasonal price discrepancies (9), which would affect
the level of farmers’ income and therefore their access to food (2).
Hence, the level of household food security may be affected directly by the size of the
physical loss of grain or indirectly by income lost when grain prices decline as a result of
deterioration in quality or inter-seasonal price variations.
5. Hypotheses
Given resource endowments and output levels, it could be hypothesized that poor postharvest
grain management practices would result in a low level of food security through(1)
the output effect, that is, a reduction in grain availability due to physical losses and
involuntary sales, and
(2) the income effect, that is, a reduction in access to food because prices received when
grains are sold immediately after harvest are lower or prices are higher when grains are
repurchased, or the quality of grains deteriorates so that they fetch lower prices.
The following specific hypotheses were suggested to guide the research work.
(a) Farmers’ perception of risk about post-harvest grain loss influences their marketing
behavior, that is, it explains why farmers dispose of most of their output immediately after
harvest and at cheaper prices, eventually producing suboptimal outcomes, which result in a
low level of household food security.
(b) Farmers’ choices of post-harvest grain management practices are conditioned by resource
endowment patterns (for example, liquidity constraints), which determine the magnitude of
losses. Hence, better-off farmers are likely to choose better post-harvest grain management
practices than the poorer ones.
(c) The potential risk associated with physical post-harvest grain losses is more important
than the potential risk associated with the market in explaining farmers’ post-harvest grain
management practices and their impacts on food security.
(d) Intercrop differences in post-harvest risk of loss are important factors determining the
share of marketed surplus of food grains; that is, the crops that are mainly marketed
immediately are those for which the risk of post-harvest loss is highest.