4 pages., Via online journal., Raising the productivity of smallholders
is a necessary condition for increasing incomes and
improving livelihoods among the rural poor in most
developing countries. This increased productivity is
essential to both household food security and to
agriculture-based growth and poverty reduction in the larger
economy. Smallholder productivity is limited by a variety of
constraints including poor soils, unpredictable rainfall,
and imperfect markets, as well as lack of access to
productive resources, financial services, or infrastructure.
Information and communication technologies (ICT) are also
vitally important to commercial and large-scale agriculture,
and to agriculture-related services and infrastructure such
as weather monitoring and irrigation. This note focuses on
the sometimes less-obvious importance of ICT in improving
the information, communication, transaction, and networking
elements of smallholder agriculture in developing countries.
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 109 Document Number: C10352
Journal Title Details:
83 pages
Notes:
Supported by the North Central Regional Center for Rural Development, with additional supported from the Farm Foundation and the Rural Development Initiative Project at Iowa State University, http://www.soc.iastate.edu/rdi-tech/page7.html, Proceedings of a Workshop, Feb. 25-27, 1997, Kansas City, Missouri
City, Utah
8 pages., Via online journal, This paper examines the effect of farmers' access to communication technologies (CTs) on farmers' agricultural output at the aggregate level in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China) based on panel data. The paper uses a dynamic Cobb–Douglas aggregate production function and the generalized method of moments (GMM) as estimation techniques to estimate the parameters of interests. The research findings are: the estimated effects (measured by elasticity) of teledensity on the provincial level agricultural output have been positive and statistically significant both in the short and long runs. In the long-run, the size of the effect is substantial: from 0.94 to 1.06. This implies that the agriculture sector of the P. R. China has some potentials to derive benefit from the use of CTs like telephone. Hence, the Chinese government should consider policy support to expand communication infrastructure for the farmers
