Improving food safety on the farm: experimental evidence from Kenya on agricultural incentives and subsidies as public health investments

Evidence continues to mount that foodborne illness imposes a staggering health burden in developing
countries. However, standard approaches used by developed country governments to ensure food
safety are not appropriate in settings where regulatory enforcement capacity is weak and most firms
are small and informal. Thus, interventions to improve food safety in developing countries must take
into account the constraints and incentives faced by producers in these countries. In this paper, we test
the impact of two such interventions: subsidies for technologies that improve food safety and price
premiums for safer produce. We examine the case of on-farm control of aflatoxin, a carcinogenic toxin
linked to child stunting that is produced by a fungus commonly found on maize and groundnut. We
show that compared to Kenyan farmers who produce maize only for their family’s own consumption,
Kenyan farmers who produce maize for sale are less likely to undertake post-harvest practices that
increase the unobservable quality of aflatoxin safety. Employing randomized discount vouchers, we
find that willingness to pay for a new post-harvest technology to prevent aflatoxin contamination is
significantly lower among market producers than subsistence farmers. However, we find that take-up
of the technology among market producers increases when they have the opportunity to sell aflatoxinsafe
maize at a premium a few months after harvest. Using take-up ratesfrom the experiment, we model
the impacts of public subsidies and market incentives for aflatoxin control. We find that subsidization
of aflatoxin control technologies is a cost-effective strategy for reducing liver cancer and possibly also
for reducing stunting in children. The most cost-effective technologies considered are widely adopted
by both subsistence and market producers, implying little additional impact of a price premium on food
safety.