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Wastage and post-harvest losses in food value chains are becoming increasingly debated and policies are being increasingly designed to reduce food wastages. Despite its presumed importance, there is large variation in the importance and type of food losses and wastage. We identify the levels of food wastage at various levels of the potato food chain for three Asian countries.

Surveys were fielded to better measure the important variation between value chain agents, to capture wastage at each level, to analyze the structure of the value chain, and to evaluate wastage over the whole value chain (except for consumption). We generate data on an important staple in these countries and analyze the importance of waste in domestic rural-urban food value chains, often the most important value chain in these countries.

We find total quantities of potatoes wasted are equal to 5.2% in the harvest period and 6.4% in the off-season of all quantities that enter the value chain for Bangladesh. Even lower numbers are obtained in India (3.2% and 3.3%, respectively). These wastage levels are higher in China, possibly because of the significantly longer distances that potatoes are shipped.

The use of cold storage facilities can minimize the level of wastage in the potato distribution chain. Studies of this type of storage for other countries and commodities can identify opportunities in which adoption of cold storage can provide the greatest contributions toward the elimination of food wastage.

The farm size-productivity relationship has long been the subject of debate among development economists. Few studies address this issue for China, and those that do only with outdated data sets poorly representing the current situation after the past decade of rapid change, which includes the rapid development of land rental markets, village labor out-migration and use of farm machines. Meanwhile, many studies have researched this relationship for Indian, which is undergoing similar changes except for the development of active land rental markets. The purpose of this paper is to measure the farm size-productivity relationship under the situations of rapid transformation in China and India.

Based on the data of 325 Jiangxi and 400 Allahabad rice farmers in 2011, the survey covered multiple plots of each household in one/multiple growing season(s). The authors use the production function approach and the yield approach, and control for farmland quality, imperfect factor markets, and farm size measurement error, to identify the farm size-productivity relationship.

The regressions show that land yields increase with plot size both by season and over the year in China. This may be one of the reasons that farm sizes are growing in some areas. In India, however, the inverse farm size-productivity relationship is observed by the study, despite recent changes. Moreover, land yields increase with farm machine use in both China and India. This result contributes to the debate over whether mechanization improves yields or just expands the land frontier.

The paper empirically estimates the farm size-productivity relationship under rapid agrarian transformation in both China and India based on a unique data set collected by the authors in a detailed primary survey. The paper considers measurement error in the analysis, which adds values to this type of analysis.