Impact of access to improved varieties on labor allocated to field preparation
labor, intensive labor, ’ labor
SECONDARY
As labor requirements for land clearing and preparation vary between different land types, land conversion decisions should be reflected in labor allocation. Assessing the impact of modern seed varieties on labor allocation, therefore, helps further address potential concerns regarding measurement errors associated with household-level plot estimates.More specifically, in the region, clearing primary forest takes more effort than clearing secondary forest or fallow as it requires intensive labor use for the felling of trees and removal of roots. Given the relative scarcity of labor during peak demand periods (including land preparation), and limited opportunities for hiring on the local labor market, these additional labor requirements are likely to lead to a reallocation of households’ labor resources. Indeed, the decline in reliance on secondary forest clearing for high-subsidy households in villages without truck delivery points to such reallocation (see Fig. While total household labor is unaffected, we find that households in treatment villages allocated more household members to work on the household farm than those in control villages (Fig. 