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This project evaluates if subsidising green agriculture technology can help reduce air pollution by shifting farmers away from crop burning, by considering the impact on fire incidence, pollution, and agricultural yields.
Raising awareness about the benefits of zinc biofortified wheat seeds that are more resilient to climatic changes as well as being more nutritious as compared to traditional seed varieties.
PxD’s Advisory with leading agronomists and climate change experts provide key recommendations that enable farmers to better adapt their practices to climate change, as well as help farmers mitigate the potential adverse impacts of climate change to the quality and quantity of their yields.
To provide more high-quality forecasts to farmers by creating a customized “weather-aware” advisory.
This project aims to improve the profitability and productivity of the often-neglected small-scale farmers, and help them in achieving greater financial inclusion in Pakistan.
To support Pakistan’s Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) through technical assistance to measure intra-urban variation in air pollution across Lahore, using air quality sensors installed sporadically across the city.
Principal Investigators:
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Usman Naeem
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This project evaluates if subsidising green agriculture technology can help reduce air pollution by shifting farmers away from crop burning, by considering the impact on fire incidence, pollution, and agricultural yields.
Pakistan’s air pollution, some of the most severe in the world, poses a serious public health threat. In Punjab province, home to approximately 110 million people, an estimated 20% of air pollution is caused by burning crop residue, primarily during the narrow two-week period between rice harvest and wheat sowing. Stubble burning is the result of the mechanisation of rice harvest; now, a new generation of mechandised equipment is poised to address the externalities from burning. In 2020, the Punjab Agriculture Department (AgriPunjab) launched a programme to subsidise equipment (rice shredders and Happy Seeders) that incorporates rice stubble back into the soil, mitigating the need to burn. These machines are designed to address stubble burning but may also yield benefits through better soil quality and sowing techniques. In its first two years, AgriPunjab implemented a public lottery to randomly select 500 subsidy recipients, out of approximately 2000 qualified programme applicants in 15 major rice-growing districts in Punjab. With the support of Pakistan’s Punjab Province Department of Agriculture, UChicago, IGC, CERP and PxD are designing an experimental study of the Punjab Agriculture Department’s (AgriPunjab) Mechanised Management of Rice Crop Residue (MMRCR) program. The study will examine the impact of the program, making use of administrative, satellite, and primary data, on the incidence of fires, crop yields, farmer profits, air pollution, and soil quality.
CERP has partnered with UChicago, Precision Development and Government of Punjab to evaluate the MMRCR program. This evaluation will generate results on the intervention’s impact on fire incidence, pollution, and agricultural yields and will produce knowledge that will enable designing possible future interventions that will mitigate crop burning in Punjab, thus reducing smog and improving air quality in the province.
The evaluation of the MMRCR program will use remote sensing data, administrative data, in-field spot-checks for crop residue fires, farmer surveys, and focus groups. In-field spot checks are expected to be completed during the current rice harvest, followed by focus groups planned after rice harvest and wheat planting. Farmer surveys are expected to be completed in later 2022/early 2023 after wheat and rice harvests, respectively. The objective is to combine spot check observations with high-resolution satellite data to train a model that predicts crop burning status across all farms in the sample based on visual indicators.
2021 – ongoing
ATAI – JPAL
University of Chicago, Precision Development, Agriculture Department GOP, CERP Survey Unit
Air Pollution, Crop Burning
Principal Investigator:
This Precision Development project focused on raising awareness about the benefits of zinc biofortified wheat seeds that are more climate resilient as well as being more nutritious as compared to traditional seed varieties.
Malnutrition is a longstanding challenge in Pakistan with stark and debilitating effects for affected families. During the 2020-2021 Rabi season, the Precision in Development (PxD) programme hosted at CERP partnered with HarvestPlus, a programme of CGIAR, to promote two varieties of zinc-biofortified wheat seeds in five districts of Punjab province, Pakistan.
Rigorous prevalence studies are limited, however available information suggests widespread zinc deficiency among children in Pakistan: more than one third of preschool-aged children and more than half of primary school children were assessed to be zinc deficient. While data is limited, studies also suggest an alarming rate of zinc deficiency among pregnant women, which may contribute to Pakistan’s poor infant and maternal mortality rates. Pakistan has the most wheat intensive diets in the world and the crop is critical for smallholder communities’ livelihoods and food security. The Zincol-16 and Akbar-19 biofortified wheat varieties developed for the Pakistani market contain up to 26 percent and 30 percent more zinc than traditional wheat varieties. Given that smallholder farmers consume up to 60% of their wheat harvest, the adoption of zinc-biofortified seed by smallholders would have positive implications for the health of their families.
PxD and HarvestPlus partnered on the ‘Harvest Plus Zinc Biofortified Seeds Project’. This involved completing a pilot project which targeted 100K smallholder farmers in five districts of Punjab: Bahawalpur, Rahim yar Khan, Khanwal, Faisalabad and Multan. The methodology for it primarily involved a series of push calls and text messages that were designed and sent out to increase awareness among the farmers.
ZB seeds were chosen for this since they are expected to be more resistant to climatic changes, in particular to heatwaves, floods and droughts, and provide high yields and nutritional value to beneficiaries.
Approximately 1.3 million SMS and 967,668 robocalls were sent to over 100,000 farmers; farmers’ pickup rates averaged 53 percent, and on average they listened to 76 percent of call duration, indicating a high level of interest amongst farmers to receive the digital advisory. Moreover, a helpline was set up to answer farmer queries and to solicit farmers’ feedback via multiple rounds of surveys. After the promotional campaign was completed, a profiling survey was conducted in which over 8,000 farmers were contacted.
Based on our profiling survey, the number of users of Akbar-19 and Zincol-16 has gone up from 131 to 872 this season in the five districts, however, it is important to keep in mind that this rise could be due to more than just our campaign, and other factors such as increased seed availability helping to boost adoption of Akbar-19 could have played a role in the growth in take-up.
Of farmers who reported planting zinc-biofortified wheat, 58 percent reported SMS/Robocalls as their primary source of information about zinc-biofortified wheat seeds, 91.9 percent of survey respondents stated that the advisory content was easily understandable, and 98.6 percent of the farmers reported that it was useful.
A post-harvest survey was completed in May/June 2021 with 679 farmers who had previously indicated that they had used one or both zinc-biofortified seeds in Rabi 2020-2021 season. Due to the absence of a control group, these results are a comparison of the farmers’ yield, income, and general experience as compared to wheat varieties from last season. It was reported that the average yield amounted to 47.95 maunds/acre for Akbar-19 in the Rabi 2020-2021 season, whereas an average of 41.49 maunds/acre has been reported for the Rabi 2019-2020 season. 76.44% of farmers who completed the post-harvest survey reported an increase in their yield this season. Both progressive and smallholder farmers reported an increase of 33% in income from wheat harvest in the Rabi 2020-2021 season as compared to the income earned in Rabi 2019-2020.
While surveys do not reach the threshold of a rigorous evaluation, they do suggest that the pilot campaign to promote zinc-biofortified seeds was quite successful. At a minimum, the pilot suggests that digital information services can be used very effectively to scale the promotion of campaigns to promote nutritious crops at a very low cost per farmer.
2020 – 2021
HarvestPlus, CGIAR
Precision Development, Ayub Agriculture Research Institute, Agriculture Department GOP
Malnutrition, Food Insecurity
Principal Investigator:
Precision Development (PxD) is intensifying their efforts to provide information to smallholder farmers that will allow them to make informed decisions to reduce the risks that climate change presents to their livelihoods and to enjoin their farming and land management activities in the fight against climate change. PxD is focusing on identifying interventions that can improve smallholder livelihoods whilst incorporating climate adaptation and mitigation efforts into their existing services.
PxD’s advisory has been put together with leading agronomists and climate change experts that provide key recommendations that enable farmers to better adapt their practices to climate change, as well as help farmers mitigate the potential adverse impacts of climate change on the quality and quantity of their yields.
PxD’s systems are designed to scale the delivery of customised digital information to individuals and households so that they act on it to improve their well-being and reduce exposure to risks and disasters such as floods and droughts. Their systems are designed to be scaled; as they scale, average costs fall and they improve the cost-effectiveness of their delivery.
Climate-smart advisory, adaptation, and mitigation efforts are already embedded into their programs across all the districts of Punjab in Pakistan, as well as into the day-to-day agricultural activities that PxD farmers carry out. They focus both on climate change adaptation (reducing potential damage) and climate change mitigation (tackling the causes), as the activities and approaches are distinct.
In Punjab, PxD sends out advisory via robocalls and SMS to over 1.3 million farmers. This advisory covers all major cash crop and several types of livestock in Punjab.
Research Questions
Examples of PxD’s work:
2020 – ongoing
IFAD
Agriculture Department GOP, IFAD, HarvestPlus, CERP, CFAN, Ayub Agriculture Research Institute, RCDS
Climate Change, Nutrition, Food Insecurity, Agriculture
Principal Investigator:
The IFAD-PxD weather product was motivated by farmer’s desire for granular and actionable weather forecasts. This project has been established to provide high-quality forecasts to farmers by creating customised “weather-aware” advisory. Weather forecasts increase farmer’s ability to choose the best production strategies as well as adapt to volatile climate conditions and extreme weather events.
Locally available forecasts typically have limited value due to low accuracy, short time horizons, inaccessible channels, and poor interpretability. With its expertise in blending behavioural economics, human-centered design, and A/B testing, PxD was well-prepared to close such gaps. Funding through IFAD allowed PxD to invest in weather forecasting product development.
PxD Pakistan has partnered with CFAN to acquire calibrated forecasts at a more granular grid size than have so far been available in Punjab. Weather forecaster CFAN is a global leader in weather and climate forecast tool development and is supplying forecasts and helping translate them into formats most useful for agronomists. CFAN was chosen for their leading meteorological expertise and experience in South Asia.
These forecasts will account for climatic parameters including rainfall, temperatures, humidity, wind speed, as well as extreme weather events like floods, droughts, hails, etc. The weather data here will be obtained at a granular geographical level; tehsil and eventually UC/village level.
These high-quality forecasts will be used to create a customised “weather-aware” advisory for farmers. PxD agronomists and external providers have generated a ‘menu’ of weather advisory structured around the crop cycle that includes pre-planting, planting, vegetative growth, reproductive growth and picking.
This information will be coupled with actionable recommendations to steer farmers towards climate-friendly practices that also reduce their costs (through better timing and usage of inputs), conserve nature (better water management) and ultimately boost yields and incomes for smallholder farmers. The project is currently in the pilot phase. This involves developing an effective product design, soliciting critical feedback from farmers, and evaluating what type, mode, or frequency is optimal. Large scale roll out is expected in 2022 to about 500K farmers in all 36 districts and about 144 tehsils of Punjab. To measure the impact of the new product, three treatment groups are in place: Flagship cotton advisory (Purpose: Control group for comparisons), Flagship and daily weather (Purpose: Identify impact of providing standalone weather forecasts), Custom weather advisory (Purpose: Identify impact of integrating weather into advisory).
2022 – ongoing
IFAD
CFAN
Climate Change, Weather, Agriculture
Principal Investigators:
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In recent decades, Pakistan’s gains in agricultural productivity have stagnated, leading to a considerable problem for the country’s development overall, since agriculture accounts for over 19% of the nation’s GDP and employs around 40% of its labor force. Globally, most interventions in agriculture have focused narrowly on a single dimension of treatment, either technology, credit, mechanisation, or information.
Few interventions have attempted to target broadly the array of problems faced by smallholders. The teams from Princeton, Yale, CERP, and HBL’s Development Finance Group (DFG) examined Pakistan’s agricultural sector in detail and identified three major problems: (i) production inefficiencies; (ii) inadequate access to markets; and (iii) lack of financing. The analysis showed that these three problems were interlinked. Farms produce low yields of inferior quality, and farmers must navigate a maze of extractive selling institutions to earn a meager profit. With insufficient income or wealth to invest in improving their operations and a limited understanding of how to access formal credit, farmers rely on exorbitantly priced financing from local middlemen. Although agricultural loans are available from all commercial banks, access is difficult, and loan utilisation is fraught with inefficiencies. Farmers are thus unable to escape a cycle of poor production and inefficient sales. Therefore, it is extremely difficult for farmers to improve their crop yield, increase profits, and achieve socio-economic progress without a broad-based intervention.
Solution
To break this negative cycle, HBL launched an innovative financial solution in late 2019, based on an integrated approach towards the entire agricultural value chain. To resolve production inefficiencies, HBL agreed to connect participant farmers with suppliers of high-quality inputs (e.g., seeds, fertilisers, pesticides) and the latest mechanisation services, thus creating a network of partner organisations. Further, HBL provided an in-house team of expert agronomists to advise growers on the best agricultural practices and oversee their implementation throughout the crop cycles. To combat extractive selling institutions, HBL also connected farmers to local, bulk buyers, who could offer market-competitive prices and provide payment within a stipulated time frame, ensuring that farmers earned profits. All of this was done under the ambit of HBL’s Development Finance model, in which the bank facilitates the provision of products and services through select third-party suppliers, rather than simply lending cash to the farmer. The arrangement aims to improve net cash flows for farmers and spare them from additional transaction costs that are commonly charged by traditional agricultural market intermediaries called arthis.
Additionally, Princeton University and CERP together led surveys of farmers and collected data at the plot level. Moreover, the team also pioneered the use of satellite imagery at this scale in Pakistan. Satellite remote sensing is used to provide real-time crop health monitoring and tailored guidance on how to improve farm productivity. This data was used to assess the impact of the project on the farmers and Pakistan’s agricultural sector in general.
Unsecured Lending & Financial Inclusion
Suboptimal production and inefficient selling are pervasive issues throughout Pakistan’s agriculture sector, regardless of the size of farmer landholding. Farmers who own fewer than seven acres, which are most of Pakistan’s farmers, are naturally more susceptible to detrimental effects of supply-side shocks. HBL’s program has been unique in its effort to help these small-scale farmers through unsecured lending. Even tenant farmers, who are traditionally excluded from financial markets due to their lack of collateral, have been included in the program. HBL’s midscale interventions have focused on small-scale farmers with average ownership of three acres per farmer, including some farmers who own as little as one acre of land.
Through this approach, HBL has not only impacted the profitability and productivity of the often-neglected small-scale farmers, but it has also progressed in its aim of achieving greater financial inclusion in Pakistan. Moreover, involving an increasing number of farmers (with most of them based in rural areas) in formal credit markets greatly improves the scale of financial opportunities available to them. Similarly, it also decreases their dependence on extractive and inefficient selling institutions.
2020-Ongoing
Habib Bank Limited
Agriculture, Finance, Agricultural Productivity, Real-time Monitoring
Principal Investigator:
The objective of this project is to support Pakistan’s Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) through technical assistance to measure intra-urban variation in air pollution across Lahore; this is done using air quality sensors installed systematically across the city.
As part of the CCDR, the Poverty and Equity Global Practice at the World Bank is looking to assess socio-economic variation in vulnerability to disaster risk related to climate change. One important activity of the CCDR is to understand the distributional variation and impact of air pollution in Lahore. Air pollution is not only hazardous for public health, but is also an amplifier of other climate risks, such as flooding and heat waves. Despite being ranked regularly amongst the topmost polluted cities in the world, however, ground-level, hyperlocal air pollution data is not available for Lahore due to a lack of continuous, distributional air quality monitoring in the city.
The project involves the following activities:
Air Pollution, Air Quality, Disaster Risk, Climate Risks