Social networks and the demand for credence agricultural technologies

Little is known about the adoption of agricultural technologies that enhance unobservable attributes, such as food quality and food safety. Social networks can potentially be a key tool to disseminate information about such technologies, because informal discussions among network members could counter the lack of observability and awareness of the benefits of such technologies. To inform this issue, we conducted a field experiment that included experimental auctions and a lottery to estimate how social networks influence the demand for Aflasafe, a new food safety-enhancing technology, among smallholder farmers in Senegal. Aflasafe is an agricultural input that controls aflatoxins, which are unobservable carcinogenic compounds that contaminate grains and compromise their safety for human consumption. Despite the lack of any food-safety regulations or price incentives in the study area, we found that demand for Aflasafe was high at baseline after farmers were trained on its benefits. The results show that social networks increased demand for Aflasafe among participants who had a lower willingness to pay in the first period. These individuals likely needed the most convincing to adopt the technology. Further, we find suggestive evidence that having an Aflasafe adopter (“lottery winner”) who used the treated groundnut for own consumption and use as future seed in an individual’s network increases their demand. Having an adopter who used the treated groundnut for other purposes in an individual’s network is not associated with any change in an individual’s demand. These findings suggest that smallholder farmers – who are often both producers and consumers of their food – engage in discussions about technologies with unobservable benefits within their agricultural social networks. Thus, it seems possible, at least in the short term, that these networks can be harnessed to increase technology adoption by leveraging farmers’ concern about their health and food safety.