Poverty impact of Bt eggplant adoption in the Philippines
2009
Francisco, S.R., Philippine Rice Research Inst., Maligaya, Science City of Muñoz, Nueva Ecija (Philippines). Socioeconomics Div.
Eggplant is one of the most economically important vegetable crops in the Philippines. Many farmers spray their eggplant crop two or more times a week some even spray 60-80 times during a normal fruiting duration for at least four months to control fruit and shoot borer (FSB), but to no avail and worst, increased production cost tremendously. This motivated the development of transgenic FSB-resistant eggplant for resource-limited farmers in the Philippines, India, and Bangladesh. This study projected impacts on poverty of Bt eggplant adoption in the Philippines. The procedure to determine the poverty-reducing impact of Bt eggplant adoption combines market-level information on economic surplus changes with a procedure to allocate income changes to individual households. The resulting poverty changes are computed using the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke (FGT) type (Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke 1984). Results of the analysis showed that poverty prevalence is reduced significantly when farmers adopt Bt eggplant. Similarly, poverty gap and severity of poverty were markedly reduced. The number of poor people dropped by 2-7 percentage points after adoption across all levels. The head count index indicated that 840 eggplant farmers would rise above poverty as a result of adopting Bt eggplant technology if 50% of them would adopt. Poverty will then be reduced by 11% if we consider only the poor eggplant farmers and 6% if we consider the 13,059 eggplant farmers of the three surveyed provinces. The adoption of Bt eggplant, therefore has a big potential to reduce the poverty incidence among eggplant farmers.
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