350 research outputs found

    Transformations in Agriculture and their Implications for Rural Development

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    The paper reviews the implications for rural development of current transformations in agriculture. It first identifies some of the driving forces - in addition to the impact of rising incomes in some but not all developing countries - behind the transformation process: changing market chains, shifts in public policy, OECD agricultural policies and HIV/AIDS. It then discusses some strategic issues for assisting the rural sector and small farms in developing countries: increasing the productivity of food staples, diversification into higher value products, organizing small farmer for marketing, agricultural services, non-farm opportunities and migration and targeting the vulnerable. It emphasizes the need for integrated interventions if small farm development is to offer a viable pro-poor option for agricultural development.rural development, poverty reduction, agricultural transformation, small farm development, Community/Rural/Urban Development, O10, O13, O18, Q10, Q18,

    The Asian Green Revolution:

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    millions fed, Green Revolution, agricultural transformation,

    Exploring market opportunities for African smallholders

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    "Wealthy countries' agricultural subsidies have also created unfair competition. African farmers not only have limited access to rich-country agricultural markets, but they also face unfair competition in their own domestic markets from subsidized imports of food staples. New challenges come from dramatically changed marketing chains that require African farmers to compete in markets that are more demanding in terms of product quality and food safety. What can be done to enhance market opportunities so that agriculture can become a more powerful engine of growth for the continent? Which markets and which products offer the greatest potential for raising incomes and food consumption? This brief addresses these questions and suggests policies that could help enlarge markets for African farmers." from Text

    Prospects for equitable growth in rural sub-Saharan Africa

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    Improving agricultural technology equitably in Africa has been difficult in the past because of the vast differences, as well as weak institutions and infrastructure in its many regions. However, the prospects for equitable growth are good for several reasons. The distribution of land has not deteriorated, and there are few landless people in Africa. Technical packages do not favor large farms over small ones, and Africa's social institutions support people with a safety net for sources of income. The author, however, points out that equitable growth, though possible is not assured and several research and policy initiatives will be needed to capitalize on the potential. First, research must continue to focus on technology appropriate for small farms and crops. Policy makers must no longer withhold assistance from service enterprises or nonfarm activities of women. Rural infrastructure has to be upgraded, and finally, governments will need to monitor land tenure and tenancy.Economic Theory&Research,Agricultural Research,Crops&Crop Management Systems,Environmental Economics&Policies,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems

    Rural - urban growth linkages in India

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    The rural nonfarm economy accounts for one-quarter of all full-time employment in rural India and for nearly one-third of rural income, and is also intimately linked to agriculture. This paper examines the importance of rural-urban growth linkages in India, and aims to assess the impact of agricultural growth on national demand for nonfarm products. In addition, because growing land scarcity raises concerns about prospects for rural labor absorption, the paper highlights the impact of agricultural growth on rural nonfarm incomes and employment.Four major sections address these objectives. The first provides a descriptive overview of nonfarm activity in India. It examines the importance, composition and location of nonfarm activity as well as general trends over the past 30 years. The second explores the relationship between agriculture and changes in nonfarm activity. After reviewing previous growth linkage studies, it compares nonfarm activity in high- and low-productivity agricultural states cross-sectionally and over time. The third section estimates the volume of rural nonfarm income and employment generated by agricultural growth, while the fourth projects patterns of demand for nonfarm goods emanating from alternative agricultural growth scenarios.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Achieving Shared Growth,Governance Indicators,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems

    Rural demand for drought insurance

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    Many agricultural regions in the developing world are subject to severe droughts, which can have devastating effects on household incomes and consumption, especially for the poor. To protect consumption, rural households engage in many different risk management strategies - some mainly risk-reducing and some simply coping devices to protect consumption once income has been lost. An important limitation of these traditional risk management strategies is their inability to insure against covariate risks and they are also costly.. The absence of formal credit and insurance institutions, which offer an efficient alternative by overcoming regional covariance problems and reducing the cost of risk management, amounts to a market failure. Past research has paid much more attention to the supply-side reasons for this market failure than to the demand side question of whether there exist financial instruments that farmers want and would be willing to pay for. The authors use a dynamic household model to examine the efficiency of drought management strategies used by peasant households. An attractive feature of the method is that it exploits actual production (input-output) data and does not deal with the usually unreliable data on household consumption and leisure activities. The model is applied to a two-year panel of data on households from five villages in Tamil Nadu (South India). The sample is small, but the data are special, as one of the two years was a severe drought year. The results indicate that agricultural households exhibit significant risk-avoidance bahavior, and that even though they may use a range of risk management strategies, there still remains an unmet demand for insurance against drought risks. The study did not estimate the likely costs of supplying drought insurance, but the latent demand in the study region is strong enough to more than cover the breakeven rate of approximately the pure risk cost (the probability of drought) plus 5 percent administration costs. The findings confirm the inadequacies of traditional strategies of coping with droughts in poor rural areas. Because of the catastrophic and simultaneous effects of droughts on all households over large areas, there is limited scope for spreading risks effectively at the local level. Either households must increase their savings significantly (a problem with low average incomes and an absence of safe and convenient savings instruments), or more effective risk management aids are needed that can overcome the covariation problem. Improved financial markets (with both credit and savings facilities) could be helpful, particularly if they intermediate over a larger and more diverse economic base than the local economy. Alternatively, formal drought insurance in the form of a drought (or rainfall) lottery might be feasible, and the results suggest that it could be sold on a full-cost basis.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Services&Transfers to Poor,Safety Nets and Transfers

    How has instability in world markets affected agricultural export producers in developing countries?

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    World prices have traditionally been unstable, however, the authors'find thehe much publicized turbulence in world markets in the mid-1970's and early 1980's to have been more a statistical fluke - an unlucky chance sample - than the beginning of any longer term increase in market instability. Variability in world prices has been almost entirely transmitted to developing countries in the dollar value of their export unit values. However, it has not been fully transmitted to average producer prices. Producer prices have been buffered by real exchange rates, domestic marketing arrangements, and government intervention, but still the level of instability remains sizable - and is the dominant source of instability in crop revenues for most producers. Unless farmers are able to diffuse the risky returns from export crops, price variability may seriously impede the expansion of agricultural exports in many developing countries.Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Crops&Crop Management Systems

    Agricultural exit problems: Causes and consequences

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    "Contrary to conventional economic theories, the relationship between income growth and the share of the population within the rural or agricultural sector is extremely diverse, even among regions starting from similar levels of development, such as Asia and Africa. The pattern in developing Asia is characterized by fast growth and slow urbanization, primarily as the result of labor-intensive agricultural growth and strong farm–nonfarm linkages. But for all its success to date, Asia appears to be increasingly vulnerable to rising inequality and jobless growth patterns. Africa presents a divergent pattern of slow growth with rapid urbanization stemming from urban-biased policies, low rural population density, and high rates of population growth. But whereas Africa's path of urbanization without growth presents problems like unemployment, congestion, and food-price inflation, it may also provide new development possibilities through greater political empowerment, lower fertility rates, and agglomeration externalities. The paper concludes with a discussion of how development strategies can address these agricultural exit problems." from authors' abstracteconomic growth, structural change, Urbanization, agricultural exits, rural to urban migration, rural non-farm employment, Inequality, employment, agglomeration externalities,

    Food aid for market development in Sub-Saharan Africa

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    "Food aid remains significant for food availability in many low-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa, helping to reduce the gap between food consumption needs and supply from domestic production and inventories and commercial imports. Food aid remains a contentious subject, however, and there have been many recent pleas for more effective use of the resource. This study explores how food aid might be used for domestic food market development to facilitate poverty alleviation and economic growth. There are obvious risks to using food aid for market development, just as there have been in using food aid to try to stimulate agricultural development. Because food aid necessarily expands local food supply, it needs to be well targeted if adverse producer price effects are to be avoided. In particular, if food aid can be targeted so as to relieve short-term working capital and transport capacity constraints to the development of downstream processing and distribution capacity in recipient country food marketing channels, for example by helping build farmer cooperative groups, then food aid could have salutary effects on sub-Saharan African agriculture." Authors' Abstract

    Farm-nonfarm linkages in rural sub-Saharan Africa

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    This paper is an accumulation, over the past 25 years, of a body of detailed work examining the structure of Africa's rural, nonfarm economy. First, it systematically reviews empirical evidence on the nature and magnitude of the African rural, nonfarm economy. It then explores differences across locality and size, across countries and over time, in an effort to assess likely patterns of growth. A subsequent review of key production and consumption parameters allows an estimate of the magnitude of the agricultural growth multipliers in Africa. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of policies and programs that will be necessary if farm-nonfarm growth linkages are to achieve their full potential.Banks&Banking Reform,Agricultural Knowledge&Information Systems,Municipal Financial Management,Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research
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