Barriers to the adoption of multiple agricultural innovations: insights from Bt cotton, wheat seeds, herbicides and no-tillage in Pakistan

ABSTRACT

The slow pace of the adoption of the latest innovations in agricultural technology innovations impedes sustainable farming practices and sustainable agriculture in developing countries. This study investigates the potential reasons that stop smallholder farming households from adopting genetically engineered seeds (Bt cotton and improved wheat seeds), herbicides resulting from cutting-edge technologies, and no-tillage farming. Utilizing original farm household-level data from 275 smallholder farming households in Pakistan, we employ multivariate probit models. The results show that the adoption of innovative technologies is not an isolated, separate process but a concoction of available technologies and cropping patterns. The estimates of the multivariate probit models show that farm machinery index, off-farm income sources, and farmers’ education facilitate technology adoption. The observations and estimates indicate that a lack of agricultural extension service contacts is present, which slows down the farmers’ adoption of agricultural technological inputs. Therefore, promoting the role of agricultural extension services (qualitatively and quantitatively) is likely to play a role in multiple technology adoption. Furthermore, the significant effect of off-farm employment shows that the lack of financial resources is another factor slowing the adoption of innovative technologies, which depends on liquidity for necessary expenditures.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural extension
• cotton-wheat zone
• cutting-edge technology
• off-farm income sources
• smallholder farming households

Acknowledgement

This research was conducted during the presence of the two authors at the School of Business & Economics, Westminster International University in Tashkent in Uzbekistan and Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO) in Germany. We thank Prof. Dr. Bernhard Brümmer (University of Göttingen) and Prof. Dr. Jan Barkmann (Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences) for their valuable suggestions and guidance in the construction of the field survey. The authors also like to thank four anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks also go to Dr. Abdusame Tadjiev (IAMO) for his intellectual support during the revision process of this paper. The authors are grateful to Mary Wales for her proofreading support. Farmers in the sample were interviewed after they provided informed consent orally and volunteered to participate in the survey.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Agricultural Census 2010 in Pakistan; https://www.pbs.gov.pk/publication/agricultural-census-2010-pakistan-report

2 Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development

3 The correlation coefficient between ‘access to credit’ and ‘off farm income’ is −0.0479 and is insignificant.

Additional information

Funding

The two authors acknowledge the financial support for the first author of this paper from the Fiat Panis Foundation [Grant Number: 29/2017] during his field research in Pakistan and a scholarship from the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan with German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) continuous consultation support (named HEC/DAAD scholarship [Scholarship Reference: 91591599]) during his postgraduate education in Germany. The open-access publication of this article became possible through Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (ZBW) agreement with Taylor & Francis and ZBW Consortium support.

Notes on contributors

Muhammad Bilal

Muhammad Bilal is currently a Senior Lecturer at the School of Business & Economics, Westminster International University in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He got Ph.D. from Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. His research interests include different aspects of food systems, sustainable development goals, innovation in agricultural technologies, smallholders, and multinational corporations in the agriculture sector.

Tinoush Jamali Jaghdani

Tinoush Jamali Jaghdani is a Research Associate at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies (IAMO) in Germany since October 2016. He received his PhD in agricultural economics (Faculty of Agriculture) with a minor in applied statistics (Faculty of Mathematics) from the University of Göttingen (Germany) in 2012. He acquired his B.Sc. (2001) and M.Sc. (2007) in agricultural economics from Iran and Germany respectively. His research focus has been on water economics, food price volatility, market power, trade duration and food supply chain governance.