African Agriculture Toward 2030

This review identifies how major trends in African urbanization and agricultural land dynamics are shaping the research priorities of the international public research system. The study’s specific purpose is to inform the research agenda and priorities of the CGIAR system

Hidden Welfare Effects of Tree Plantations

Subsidies to promote tree plantations have been recently questioned because of potential negative social and environmental impact of the forestry industry. Quantitative evidence on the socioeconomic causal impacts of afforestation subsidies or of tree plantations is elusive, mainly due to data scarcity. We assess the overall impact of such a subsidy in Chile by using an original 20 years panel data set that includes small area estimates of poverty and relate it to the subsidy assignment at census-district scale. We show, with a battery of impact evaluation techniques, that forestry subsidies -on average- do, in fact, increase poverty. More specifically, using difference in difference with matching techniques, and instrumental variable approaches we show that there is an increment of about 2% in the poverty rate of treated (with subsidized tree plantations) localities. We also identify a causal mechanism by which tree plantations induce higher poverty, which is a negative effect on employment. Our research indicates the existence of negative welfare effects of the afforestation subsidy on local populations suggesting a reassessment of the distributional effects of the subsidy and the industry. Acknowledgement

Rural Development and Poverty Reduction: Is Agriculture Still Key?

This paper examines the relationship between rurality and poverty, and the role the agricultural sector can play in rural development, poverty reduction, and overall development. The historical views regarding the role of the primary sector in development are presented, and then using original data, the paper argues that there was an historical misjudgment against the primary sector that served as a foundation for anti-agricultural bias in public policy until the late 80’s. Finally, this paper explains how under certain conditions territorial/regional development strategies may prosper, but in other conditions, particularly in the least-developed countries rural space, agriculture is still necessarily the starting point for rural development

Oil and food prices in Malaysia: a nonlinear ARDL analysis

The present paper analyses the relations between food and oil prices for Malaysia using a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model. The bounds test of the NARDL specification suggests the presence of cointegration among the variables, which include the food price, oil price and real GDP. The estimated NARDL model affirms the presence of asymmetries in the food price behavior. Namely, in the long run, we find a significant relation between oil price increases and food price. Meanwhile, the long run relation between oil price reduction and the food price is absent. Furthermore, in the short run, only changes in the positive oil price exert significant influences on the food price inflation. With the absence of significant influence of oil price reduction on the food price both in the long run and in the short run, the role of market power in shaping the behavior of Malaysia's food price is likely to be significant