The impact of post-harvest training interventions on adoption and production behavior: evidence from black pepper farmers in Sri Lanka

As agricultural development increasingly targets high-value crops and markets, food quality and safety have become critical. However, smallholder farmers often face barriers to adopting quality-enhancing practices in the post-production stage because of their limited access to reliable information. Most research on information provision emphasises the need to reduce quantity losses in staple crops, leaving a research gap with respect to quality improvements in high-value crops such as black pepper. This study addresses this gap by evaluating the impact of government training and farmer-to-farmer experience sharing on the adoption of post-harvest quality improvement practices and production behaviour. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 660 black pepper farmers in the Matale District of Sri Lanka. We found that government training significantly improves the adoption of key post-harvest practices such as threshing, fresh berry grading, dry berry grading, and blanching and leads to a shift in production from low quality to high quality. Our findings highlight the importance of structured expertise-led training to improve the quality of high-value crops.