Browsing by Author "Perez-Silva, Rodrigo"

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    Public policies, sustainability, and smallholder producers' access to the market. The Productive Alliance Programme in Chile: A case study
    (2022) Castillo, Mayari; Perez-Silva, Rodrigo; Chamorro, Catalina; Sepulveda, Macarena
    This study analyses the role of Chile's Productive Alliance Programme (PAP) in increasing welfare and improving access to the market for smallholder producers, by developing a sustainable agriculture in both social and environmental terms. This programme started in 2007 under the Ministry of Agriculture and now serves 3,600 smallholders in Chile. It seeks to create commercial partnerships between these smallholders and large companies, providing subsidies to establish conditions that allow the farmers to build new capabilities and skills. This case study used qualitative methodology and carried out 36 semi-structured interviews over July and August 2020. Interviewees included companies and smallholder producers within different productive chains, as well as public officials. The purpose of this analysis is to discuss the opportunities family farmers have to become a fundamental link in the supply chain of competitive companies at the national and international level. By providing targeted training on market requirements, agricultural management, risk management and sustainable use of resources, the programme enables smallholder producers to establish stable commercial alliances, improving their productive and management capacity. Although the programme's main outcome is not related to a significant increase in smallholders' income, participants perceive more stable earnings, reduced uncertainty, and improve their productive skills, mainly in terms of management and sustainable farming practices.
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    Taking advantage of water scarcity? Concentration of agricultural land and the politics behind water governance in Chile
    (2023) Perez-Silva, Rodrigo; Castillo, Mayari
    Chile is currently facing a major drought that has caused several problems, most of them concentrated in terms of the availability of water for both human consumption and irrigation for agriculture. Under such conditions, the main instrument the government has at hand to assign water for agricultural use is the Water Scarcity Decree (WSD), which, among other aspects, allows for the extraction of underground water. However, this practice requires an important investment from the agricultural producer, making it only affordable by relatively larger producers. Therefore, under the current climatic conditions and a generalized lack of water, larger agricultural producers are the ones who benefit the most from the establishment of a WSD and thus have the incentives to use their political power to pressure for its issuing. Whereas conventional wisdom suggest that this is indeed the case, there is no previous evidence trying to link the size of agricultural exploitations and the likelihood of the establishment of a WSD. In the paper we use the share of large exploitations at the municipality level, as a measure that can proxy for local political power, and the establishment, the number, and duration of WSD within any given year. Consistent with the hypothesis, our results show that areas dominated by larger producers/exploitations are more likely to be declared as water scarce, to have more decrees in a year, and to have them in place for longer periods of time, even after controlling for socioeconomic characteristics and climatic conditions, such as precipitations and water flow.