COTTON SECTOR POLICIES AND PERFORMANCE IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA:LESSONS BEHIND THE NUMBERS IN MOZAMBIQUE AND ZAMBIA

Cotton is one of the most important smallholder cash crops in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). How to ensure input supply, credit recovery and competition is a subject of intense policy debate. This paper examines the performance of cotton sector development policies in Mozambique and Zambia. Both countries face the challenge of organizing input supply to farmers in the absence of rural credit markets, and competing in international markets distorted by production subsidies in developed countries. Both countries privatized cotton ginning in the 1990s. Emerging from civil war, Mozambique established geographical monopolies to interlink input and output markets and facilitate credit recovery. In Zambia, the government completely liberalized the cotton sector, forcing the private sector to deal with the problem of input distribution and credit recovery by itself. Despite being landlocked, Zambia's cotton sector has achieved better performance in terms of both value of cotton output per hectare and smallholder share of world market prices. An analysis of the institutional and technical factors behind the two countries' performance provides insights to guide the design of public/private partnerships relevant to many SSA countries.Cotton, Mozambique, Zambia, liberalization, agricultural policy, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries,

Industry Organization and Output Size Distribution of Cotton Gins in the U.S.

Selected Paper prepared for presentation at the Southern Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL, February 6-9, 2010Cotton, cotton gins, transitional probabilities, Markov, minimum efficient scale, Crop Production/Industries, Industrial Organization,

Cotton in Zambia: An Assessment of its Organization, Performance, Current Policy Initiatives, and Challenges for the Future

This paper grows out of earlier work on cotton by the Food Security Research Project. It is directed towards policy makers and private stakeholders in Zambia’s cotton sector, and has four main purposes: (a) To provide a detailed descriptive overview of the organization of the sector and of the behavior of key public and private participants in the sector; (b) To assess cotton’s role in smallholder livelihood strategies, and its competitiveness at the farm level with a key alternative crop–maize; (c) To critically evaluate recent policy initiatives in the sector and suggest key modifications that might be needed; and (d) To identify the primary challenges that the sector faces to ensure its future competitiveness in regional and international markets.food security, food policy, Zambia, cotton, smallholder livelihood, Crop Production/Industries, Q18,

SOME TESTS OF THE ECONOMIC THEORY OF COOPERATIVES: METHODOLOGY AND APPLICATION TO COTTON GINNING

Little progress has been made in testing the often conflicting hypotheses generated from theoretical research on cooperatives. This paper addresses the deficiency by describing and applying (to California cotton ginning cooperatives) a methodology to test key hypotheses concerning (a) cooperativesÂ’ price-output equilibrium, (b) allocative efficiency, and (c) utilization of capital inputs. The empirical results (a) are consistent with predictions from the game theory model of cooperative behavior, (b) reject the null hypothesis of absolute allocative efficiency, and (c) indicate absolute overutilization of capital inputs among the sample cooperatives.Agribusiness, Crop Production/Industries,