Evaluating impact of providing information about futures prices

Principal Researchers: Prof. Shawn Cole (Harvard Business School) and Stefan Hunt (PhD student, Harvard Business School)
Partner Organization: SEWA, Gujarat

The goal of the study is three-fold: first, to design and evaluate an education program about future markets that is accessible to households with low levels of education and financial literacy; second, to measure the impact of improved knowledge of agricultural prices on planting decisions and harvesting decisions; finally, to carefully measure the welfare improvement from this intervention.

36 out of 74 villages in four districts of rural Gujarat (Ahmedabad, Surendranagar, Mehsana, and Baroda) are randomly selected and receive a future market educational campaign. This campaign includes village-level meetings and household visits during the off season as well as reinforcement and delivery of price information at the time farmers make the key decisions of what to plant and when to harvest.

This training is provided by specially appointed individuals from NCDEX, working together with agricultural outreach workers from the SEWA. By the end of August 2007, a follow-up survey will be conducted and compare farmers in villages that were offered information on futures prices to those who were not, credibly evaluating the impact of futures price information on welfare of rural farmers.

CMF Research Associate: Will Talbott

CMF documents:
# Nilesh Fernando's Presentation at Risk Mitigation in Agriculture Conference, August 2009
# Future Prices Operations Manual, August 2009 [PDF]
# Risk Mitigation in Agriculture Conference, August 2009

Check out this short video on the project.