The AARES New England Branch and the UNEBS R&RT Committee cordially invite you to the seminar of Dr Daniel Gregg (University of Adelaide). The session will be held on Friday 22nd November in W40-LT2, EBL Building, at 11:00AM. An informal catering will be provided.

Seminar Title: “Output quality incentives under aggregation and monitoring failure in smallholder-dominated coffee supply chains: A case study of coffee production in eastern Uganda”

Abstract

Smallholders are the largest producers of coffee in many countries, particularly in East Africa. Yet specialty coffee supply chains are almost ubiquitously organised in a way that marginalises most smallholder farmers, and most commonly those who lack social or financial power. There is a simple reason for this: it is difficult to get consistently high quality coffee from supply chains dominated by many smallholder producers. We show, however, that this problem is solvable by integrating economic concepts focused on resolving asymmetric information problems (i.e. adverse selection and moral hazard) and public good problems. We outline the conceptual solution to these issues in terms of monitoring for quality and applying individual-level incentives. A case study in the eastern highlands of Uganda provides evidence at the picker level (using a sample of labour contracting experiments) and at the grower level (using a sample of processing station data), that applying conditional contracting approaches can generate alignment of incentives in smallholder-dominated coffee supply chains. We outline the importance of these issues and suggest a scalable approach to upgrading coffee value chains through integration of economic theory into smallholder-dominated supply chain interventions.

 Daniel Gregg is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Global Food and Resources, University of Adelaide. His work is in the areas of development economics, environmental economics and agricultural economics. He has a focus on decision analysis, incentives, production, environmental valuation, and, increasingly, supply chain organisation. Daniel uses a range of methods in his research and is regarded as an expert in the applied econometric analysis, experimental methods including lab-based and field-based experiments, survey development, and environmental valuation methods (design, survey, implementation and analysis). He has experience in research projects across Australia, India, Laos, Timor Leste, Uganda and New Zealand and has led research programs in most of those locations. Daniel is a co-founder and Director of Intersection Traders, a development-focused company providing support to market development for smallholder-dominated coffee supply chains, Associate Editor of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Secretary of the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES).