A Rational Risk Policy for Regulating Plant Diseases and Pests

Diseases and pests pose risks to U.S. agriculture and forests, but regulations and quarantines to control these risks are costly. The U.S. Department of Agriculture issues rules to control these risks based on economic analyses that do not take adequate account of links between risks and policy outcomes. A benefit-cost analysis that fully incorporates both the risk of a disease outbreak and the effect of regulations and quarantines on such risk can yield quite different conclusions. We apply methods that combine probabilistic risk assessments with economic analysis. We show that if USDA had incorporated risk into its benefit-cost analysis of Karnal bunt, a disease affecting wheat, it would have reached different conclusions about the impact of its actions. We estimate that suboptimal regulatory decisions in the case of Karnal bunt cost between $350 million and$390 million per year. We recommend that USDA incorporate risk assessments into its economic analyses of proposed regulations.

Institutional Innovations for Smallholder Compliance with International Food Safety Standards: Experiences from Kenya, Ethiopian and Zambian Green Bean Growers

Many African countries have moved into the production of non-traditional agricultural products to diversify their exports and increase foreign currency earnings. Accessing developed country markets requires meeting food safety standards brought about by several demand and supply side factors. Food retailers in the EU, the major destination market, have developed protocols relating to pesticide residue limits, field and packinghouse hygiene, and traceability. In this changing scenario where food safety requirements are getting increasingly stringent, there are worries that companies that establish production centers in LDCs might exclude smallholder farmers. In this paper, we study the cases of green beans production in Ethiopia, Kenya and Zambia for export to high value European markets. Though the immediate effect of the imposition of stringent food safety standards has been to screen away smallholders, there has been continued participation of smallholders in some cases. This paper finds that emergence of new institutional arrangements have enabled the smallholders to maintain their participation in high value European markets. In particular, public-private partnerships have played a key role in helping smallholder farmers acquire training on and certification against European food safety standards. Collective action in form of producer organizations has enabled smallholders to jointly invest in costly facilities and take advantage of economies of scale to remain competitive. Producer organizations also allow for cheaper means for buyers to ensure traceability and are critical in reducing transaction costs of linking up with smallholders.international food safety standards, compliance, smallholder farmers, institutional arrangements, collective action, producer organizations, public-private partnerships, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Food Security and Poverty, Labor and Human Capital, Marketing, Production Economics, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Technology transfer, policies, and the role of the private sector in the global poultry revolution:

"With the Biotech Revolution, questions are being asked about what role the government should play in the process—does public research in developing countries play a role? Can governments speed the spread of technology by offering complementary services? Unlike the public investment–driven Green Revolution in cereals, the “Poultry Revolution” in developing countries was driven by the successful transfer of biological technology developed by the private sector in the developed world to developing countries. This paper uses a supply response function to measure the importance of different types of private technology and of public investments on poultry productivity. The findings confirm that imported private technology was important to the growth of the poultry industry but also emphasize the importance of complementary government investments such as veterinary services." from authors' abstractsupply response function, private sector research, Technology transfer, Poultry, Public investment,

Structural changes in the Philippine pig industry and their environmental implications:

"Pig production in the Philippines has intensified in the urban and peri-urban areas in response to a radical structural change in the pig industry and a growing demand for pork products. Alongside this rapid growth is the emergence of societal concern about the increasing negative environmental externalities that the industry produces, particularly those related to the disposal of waste and dead animals. Pig producers are said to benefit from negative externalities when they do not bear the full social costs of their business enterprise. Non-internalization of such externalities occurs when pig producers receive payment for their output while not investing in pollution abatement or not making compensatory payments to surrounding communities affected by their production processes. In some cases, producers are able to recycle all nutrients from swine production on-farm through various cropping mechanisms. In other cases, pig production is so large that there is no land to properly dispose of such by-products without some environmental mitigation effort. Failure to implement any sort of measure will most likely lead to an environmental externality. To determine whether a farmer has the ability to utilize all manure produced on-farm, we use a mass balance calculation approach in this paper. Results for the mass balance calculations suggest that, in general, smaller farms generate less excess nutrients per hectare than larger farms. This is because most small-scale pig farms are mixed systems where some croplands are available for nutrient assimilation. Large commercial farms tend to be “pure land-intensive” systems. We used a Tobit regression analysis to determine the factors affecting environmental mitigation expenditures of pig farms. Results of the regression showed that smaller farms tend to respond to opportunities to make use of manure as fertilizer on their own farms and crops. For large farms, no single factor significantly influenced mitigation costs. An interpretation of why this is so or what this result implies apparently cannot be achieved without ambiguity. Thus, we do not attempt to do so and we leave the matter for further investigation. With respect to the effects of production arrangement on environmental capture, the factors that significantly influenced mitigation costs varied between independent and contract farms. Only the operation of croplands mattered for independent producers. For contract farms, lands that are classified as agricultural carried the expected positive coefficient sign. Further, farmers in the industrial pig sector, which is concentrated in peri-urban areas favored by market access or feed availability, may consider being located as close as possible to cropland that they can use to dispose of the wastes in pig production. Policy options include zoning, mandatory nutrient management plans, licensing or limiting the number of animals raised per production unit, and contractual agreements between livestock producers and crop farmers. The effectiveness of such regulations will depend largely on the degree to which they are enforced and whether they are accompanied by a well-developed system of education and extension with focus on proper manure management systems and dead animal disposal." from Author's AbstractEnvironmental mitigation, Mass balance, Structural changes, Pig production, Water quality,

RESOURCE QUALITY AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY: A MULTI-COUNTRY COMPARISON

This paper builds on earlier studies of agricultural productivity by incorporating spatially referenced soil and climate data combined with high-resolution land-cover data. Econometric analysis of these data, along with panel data on agricultural inputs and outputs from 110 countries for 1961-1997, quantifies the significant impact that differences in land quality have on agricultural productivity.Productivity Analysis,

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF INTERCEPTIONS OF FRESH PRODUCE FROM LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN INTO THE UNITED STATES

This paper develops a method to examine data on fresh produce imports from Latin America and the Caribbean into the United States from 1993-1999 to determine: 1) if there are significant differences in frequency of interceptions for a specific product for the region or a specific country within the region, and 2) whether significant changes in trade flows for specific products have occurred between points of origin and ports of entry. The results show that there are indeed differences between countries with respect to interception frequency, however current data on the fumigation frequency for a commodity/country or commodity/port of entry is not sufficient to determine the causes that underlie differences in frequencies between countries.International Relations/Trade,

Determinants and implications of the growing scale of livestock farms in four fast-growing developing countries:

"The rapid growth in consumer demand for livestock offers an opportunity to reduce poverty among smallholder livestock farmers in the developing world. These farmers' opportunity may be threatened, however, by competition from larger-scale farms. This report assesses the potential threat, examining various forms of livestock production in Brazil, India, the Philippines, and Thailand. Findings show that the competitiveness of smallholder farms depends on the opportunity cost of family labor and farmers' ability to overcome barriers to the acquisition of production- and market-related information and assets. Pro-poor livestock development depends, therefore, on the strengthening of institutions that will help smallholders overcome the disproportionately high transaction costs in securing quality inputs and obtaining market recognition for quality outputs. These and other findings make this report a useful guide for researchers and others concerned with the opportunities and risks of smallholder livestock farming." from Authors' SummaryDeveloping countries, Economic aspects, Industrialization, Profit efficiency, Environmental externalities, Smallholder competitiveness, Livestock productivity, Livestock Industrialization, Scaling up,

Improving lives of people in Africa

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Special Issue on ‘The Spread of Pathogens through International Trade’

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Global poultry sector trends and external drivers of structural change

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