Food Safety and Adverse Selection in Rural Maize Markets

ABSTRACT: Without enforced standards or reliable third-party verification, food safety threats such as pesticide residues and aflatoxin contamination are generally unobservable or only partially observable to both buyers and sellers, especially of staple foods in rural maize markets in sub-Saharan Africa. As a result, sellers have more information about food quality than do buyers. Such information asymmetries can impede market development and undermine human health. We study farm household behaviour in the context of imperfect food safety information. We pool observations obtained from 707 food storage containers maintained by 309 farm households in Benin, surveyed following the maize harvests of 2011/2012 and 2013/2014. Our results indicate that when a household perceives a food safety risk associ

SUBMITTER: Kadjo D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7198124 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature