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Contents & Foreword, Characterizing And ... - IRRI books

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appears to be the opportunities it creates for farms to cultivate nonrice crops. In theabsence of such investments, farms appeared to adopt land-use options (i.e., fruittrees and other perennial crops) more immune to the effects of poor water management.Lastly, the significance of the parameter Rho emphasizes the importance ofunobservable farm/household characteristics on land-use options and underscores thecomplexity of the land-use choices of farms.Our measures of market accessibility and variables characterizing biophysicalconditions in the surveyed villages were fixed over time or observed only once, so weare unable to examine the principal hypotheses of our analytical model through thepanel estimators. Accordingly, we used cross-sectional estimates of cropping patternsand rice-cropping intensity to examine our hypotheses concerning the effect of accessibilityof land use. Rice-cropping intensity is a categorical variable for which thecategories have a natural ordering, so an ordered probit estimator is used. The estimatesof rice-cropping intensity are significant overall in each of the four years accordingto the goodness of fit measures reported at the bottom of Table 4.The key variables of interest from our analytical model are the measures of thedistance between the villages where farms are located and the average travel time toall local markets accessible to the farm and the distance between the homestead andplot or plots operated by the farm. The greater these distances, the lower the likelyrice-cropping intensity to be adopted by the farm. Estimation results provide limitedconfirmation of the model’s hypotheses. The distance between the farm plot and marketshad a negative and statistically significant effect on rice-cropping intensity inmodel estimates in 1995 and 1997. According to 1995 results, each 10 km of distancebetween the homestead and accessible markets causes a 4.4% reduction in the probabilitythat the farm cultivated two rather than a single rice crop, and a 6.7% reductionin the probability of cultivating three rather than two rice crops. Similar marginaleffects were estimated in 1997. Greater distances between farm homesteads and plotswere associated with a reduced probability of intensive rice cultivation by the farm—but estimated parameters were not statistically significant. According to 1995 estimationresults, a 10-minute increase in the average travel time between the farm andplots was associated with a 14% and 21% decrease in the probability of cultivatingtwo and three crops during the year, respectively. Across all the land-use modelsestimated, the distances between the farm and markets and between the homesteadand farm plots had the effect of reducing the cropping intensity on-farm. The effect ofthe distance between the farm and markets was greater in the case of rice-croppingintensity, whereas distances between the homesteads and farming plots caused greaterreductions in the general cropping intensity (results not shown).The study estimated other land-use, production, and rice supply functions impliedby our land-use model or basic microeconomic theory. These included the following:general cropping intensity, farm cropping pattern, and rice production andfarm supply of rice to the market. Together, the estimates provide a clear indication ofthe factors driving farm land-use, production, and marketing decisions. We summarizethe major conclusions that emerge from these estimates.464 Edmonds and Kam

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