De Zhou

Market-oriented agriculture functions as a critical mechanism by which rural farmers can alleviate poverty and enhance food security, and it is actively promoted in Côte d’Ivoire. However, household food security varies across commercialized farmers depending on context and region. This paper examines variations in food security between different market-oriented vegetable-farming households in rural northern Côte d’Ivoire. Using cross-sectional data from 200 vegetable farmers, this study employs an endogenous switching regression model to address potential selectivity bias. The results show that market-oriented farming is positively associated with higher food-consumption scores, greater dietary diversity, and increased caloric intake. Moreover, nonparticipants or semi-subsistence farmers are expected to achieve better food-security outcomes under market-oriented conditions. Key factors influencing the adoption of market-oriented farming include market proximity, access to extension services, and education level. This paper advocates for policies tailored to specific environments, such as rural smallholder farming communities, that support local markets and encourage entrepreneurship, especially among women and youth, and ensure the accessibility of improved inputs, thereby supporting market-oriented agriculture and enhancing food security.

The presence of risks in rubber markets would have significant adverse effects on farmers’ welfare. Crop diversity is usually proposed as a countermeasure to mitigate the negative environmental impacts and high price risks faced by monocultural rubber farmers. Given that most farmers in developing countries are risk-averse, the present study aims to examine the differences in price risk experienced by crop diversity and monoculture rubber farmers, while illustrating the welfare impacts of crop diversity within a theoretic risk-averse framework. Standard deviation is employed as a measure of price risk indices for rubber and other major agricultural products. The data on prices of main agricultural products were obtained from the Office of Agricultural Economics (OAE), covering the period from 2002 to 2021. The estimated price risk indices for rubber prices and prices of 18 other major crops indicate that the annual rubber price risk index is highest among all major agricultural products in Thailand, with a value of .417. In comparison, the average price risk indices of food crops and horticulture/fruit crops are .252 and .257, respectively. These elevated levels of rubber price risks could result in substantial risk costs and decreased welfare for farmers engaged in monoculture practices, particularly those who are trapped in poverty. This confirms the potential benefit associated with adopting crop diversity to enhance household welfare within the rubber industry, providing compelling evidence supporting efforts towards promoting rubber crop diversity plantation and sustainable development of rubber industry in Thailand.

Given the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of monoculture rubber plantation, FAO emphasized the use and protection of crop diversity which also has been proposed for sustainable development of rubber industry in Thailand. But the adoption of such technology is relatively low that makes rubber crop diversity highly controversy in Thailand. With 2,159 observations at rubber household level collected in 2012–2014, present study investigated the impacts of crop diversity adoption on rubber farmers’ net income in Thailand with use of propensity score matching models. The study found that rubber crop diversity adoption had statistically significant negative impacts on the net income of rubber farmers. And the rubber crop diversity farmers got lower net income of [-11,785.29, -10,887.21] baht per person than monoculture rubber farmers. As the rubber crop diversity system usually grants environmental benefits to the local eco-systems which are exactly the positive externalities and non-rewarded in the market, more incentives and supports are necessary to steam up rubber crop diversity adoption and the sustainability of rubber industry in Thailand.

Objectives: To evaluate various diet quality indices and to estimate their associations with major non-communicable diseases (NCD) (i.e. diabetes mellitus (DM) and myocardial infarction (MI)) and risk for overweight (OW).Design: Four dietary diversity indices (namely, count index (Count), dietary diversity score index, berry index (BI) and entropy index (EI)) and three Chinese dietary guideline-based indices (namely, China healthy diet index, Chinese food pagoda score and diet quality divergence index) were employed to evaluate Chinese diet quality. DM, MI and OW were used as diet-related health indicators. Logit regressions were employed to unveil the associations between diet quality indices and NCD and risk for OW. The relationships between diet quality indices and daily energy intakes were checked with ordinary least squares linear regressions.Setting: Four recent waves (2004, 2006, 2009, 2011) of longitudinal individual data from China Health and Nutrition Survey.Participants: Chinese adults (aged 18–64 years) from twelve provinces were included in the analysis (n 30 350).Results: Count, BI, and EI were positively associated with higher OW risk and daily energy intakes. As dietary guideline-based indices got better, people were exposed to lower DM and OW risks and got lower daily energy intakes. Finally, dietary guideline-based indices properly revealed the expected relationships that high-quality diets would reduce NCD and risk for OW, while high diversity indices were usually correlated with over-nutrition and high risks.Conclusions: Increasing diversity of the diet does not necessarily improve the nutrition and health. Dietary guideline-based indices are more robust than dietary diversity indices; thus, they should be highly recommended when evaluating diet quality.