Priorities for a global cassava research program to improve food security and incomes in developing countries: A survey of experts.

The resources available for implementing the CGIAR Research Program Roots, Tubers, and Bananas (CRP-RTB) are limited and have an opportunity cost in terms of foregone alternatives.There are many alternative research options that can be pursued to improve food security and incomes for resource-poor farmers in developing countries. This raises the need to identify how to best invest limited resources in order to generate the greatest impacts per dollar invested. The CRPRTB proposes a six stage process for setting priorities. As an initial step in this process, this study describes the perceptions of cassava research priorities by cassava researchers, development and extension specialists. These experts were asked to rank three top constraints on cassava production, transformation and commercialization and to rate the importance of 13 kinds of research options to reduce poverty and improve food security. The ranking was based on a five-point scale, between 5 as the most important and 1 as the least important research option. Results presented reflect perceptions of critical priorities for cassava research based on tallying of the response and provide the basis for further priority setting in the CRP-RTB

National wage trends and migration in a Chinese village economy: a micro level modeling approach baed on a composite utility function

China's economy is experiencing a regime shift away from a fully elastic supply of labor from a large pool of rural surplus labor and toward a situation of increasing labor scarcity and rising wage rates. Moreover, faster wage increases in the regions of origin of many rural-urban migrants are likely to affect the dynamics of inter-regional migration. These wage trends have implications at the local level, in particular in a setting in which migration connects rural communities to the national labor market and in which migration is of high importance for the livelihoods of rural households. Taking a village perspective, this article develops a village computable general equilibrium model to study local impacts of current wage trends in China. As a central piece of the model, the role of access to migration for household livelihoods is recognized. Access to migration is linked to household demographics and included in the model through a composite utility function that captures household preferences and disutilities associated with alternative off-farm activities. Simulation results illustrate how households' utility considerations affect migration responses to national wage changes. Statements about possible impacts on village level labor supply, land use, and agricultural production are made. When migration wages and local off-farm wages are simulated to increase, an overall increase in household and village migration and a higher supply of labor to local off-farm labor markets is accompanied by a contraction of farm production. Although land is reallocated between households with different migration responses, total agricultural output declines

World market integration of Vietnamese rice markets during the 2008 food price crisis

World market prices of rice have been subject to large fluctuations in recent years. In mid 2008, prices reached levels never seen before. Vietnam is a major exporter of rice and rice is also the main staple food of the country. Given the importance of rice for domestic food security, the Vietnamese government is intervening in its international trade by limiting exports in order to insulate domestic consumers from price hikes in the world market. The effects of these policy interventions on price transmission from international to domestic markets were investigated in this study. We analyzed the marketing chain of rice in Vietnam, constructed a multivariate vector error correction model for markets across the country and included a plicy paramter as well as an inernational reference price. We found reasonable cointegration of most markets analyzed an donly a limited effect of the applied export policies: they suppressed the price int he main producing region, the Mekong Delta, but did not significantly affect the prices in the main deficit regions of Northern Vietnam. From a food security perspective, it is likely to be more efficient to implement food security programs and public safety nets that are directly targeted at the poor, rather than attempting to insulate the whole country from the world market