Demand and supply factors constraining the emergence and sustainability of an efficient seed system - three experiments in Uganda

Agricultural technology remains under-adopted among smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. We investigate how the quality of an agricultural technology – improved maize seed – affects its adoption. The research entails three hypotheses that will be tested in a series of randomized controlled trials among agro-input dealers and smallholder farmers in Uganda. In a first hypothesis, quality concerns that constrain uptake are caused by information inefficiencies at the level of the agro-input dealer, who is assumed to lack knowledge about proper storage and handling. An intensive training program is expected to increase improved maize seed quality and subsequent adoption by farmers. A second hypothesis conjectures that information asymmetry between seller and buyer with respect to the quality of seed – a classic lemons technology – leads to under-adoption. We implement a crowd-sourced information clearinghouse similar to yelp.com to test this hypothesis. This hypothesis targets the interaction between farmers and input dealers. A third hypothesis targets farmers directly, as sub-optimal adoption is assumed to be caused by learning failures: Farmers might attribute disappointing outcomes to poor input quality, while in reality many input dimensions like the time of planting, weeding and fertilizer application co-determine outcomes. An ICT-mediated information campaign that stresses the importance of paying attention to all input dimensions is implemented to test this hypothesis.