Estimating effects of cooperative membership on farmers’ safe production behaviors: Evidence from pig sector in China

Abstract This research studies the determinants of pig farmers’ participation in farmers’ cooperatives and the effects of farmers’ cooperatives on pig farmers’ behaviors in adopting safe production practices using data from a household survey of 540 cooperative farmers and 270 non-cooperative farmers from four main pig production provinces in China. The propensity score matching (PSM) method was adopted to deal with possible self-selection bias associated with farmers’ participation in farmers’ cooperatives due to observables, which is further supplemented by a sensitivity analysis to assess the degree to which the PSM results are robust to the presence of unobservables. The PSM results show that the cooperative membership has significant and positive influence on farmers’ propensity to adopt safe production practices and the effects are heterogeneous across a number of key cooperative, farm and household attributes. Specifically, the membership effects tend to be bigger for cooperatives led by Investor-owned firms (IOFs) and farms of small production scale. And the effects tend to be greater for households (1) of medium and high level of education, (2) of less than 10 years of pig production experience, (3) of no off-farm job experience, and (4) that are specialized in pig production. The sensitivity analysis further increases our confidence in the results for the feed use and the breed use, however, the results for vaccination, drug use and waste disposable are more sensitive to the influence of unobservables, therefore should be interpreted with caution.