Standards as barriers and catalysts for trade and poverty reduction.

The importance of food standards in global agricultural trade has increased strongly, but the effects are uncertain. Several studies argue that these standards imposed by high-income countries diminish the export opportunities for developing countries and concentrate the benefits of trade with processing and retailing companies and large farms, thereby casting doubt on the development impact of international agricultural trade. Other argue that the standards can be catalysts for growth. In this paper we critically review the arguments and empirical evidence on the link between increasing food standards, developing country exports and welfare in those countries. We conclude that the evidence is often weaker as claimed. We also provide new insights from two recent survey-based empirical studies. We conclude that standards can be a catalyst for trade, growth and poverty reduction in developing countries.Trade;

Gender and modern supply chains in developing countries.

The rapid spread of modern supply chains in developing countries is profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded. In this paper we examine the gender implications in modern supply chains. We conceptualize the various mechanisms through which women are directly affected, we review existing empirical evidence and add new survey-based evidence. Empirical findings from our own survey suggest that modern supply chains may be associated with reduced gender inequalities in rural areas. We find that women benefit more and more directly from large-scale estate production and agro-industrial processing, and the creation of employment in these modern agro-industries than from smallholder contract-farming.

Trade, standards and poverty: Evidence from Senegal.

Trade; Exports;

Liberalization with endogenous institutions: a comparative analysis of agricultural reform in Africa, Asia and Europe.

Thirty years ago, a vast share of the poor and middle income countries were heavily statecontrolled. The effects of the liberalizations in the 1980s and 1990s differed strongly between regions in Africa, Asia and Europe. This paper first documents these differences in reform effects in a comparative framework and then develops a model to formally analyze how liberalization affects production and income distribution when institutions that govern production and exchange are also affected. We derive hypotheses on how the endogenous institutional adjustments affect the supply response to the liberalizations. We use these insights to forward a series of explanations on the differences in performance across countries following liberalization.

Growth in high-value export markets in sub-Saharan Africa and its development implications.

During the past decades the global food system changed dramatically with increased trade in high-value food products, increased exports from developing countries, increased consolidation and dominance of large multinational food companies, and increased proliferation of public and private food standards. As a consequence, global food trade is increasingly organised around vertically coordinated supply chains rather than around spot market transactions. While there is consensus that these structural changes are profoundly changing the way food is produced and traded, there is no consensus on the overall welfare implications of increased high-value food exports and supply chain restructuring in poor countries. In this paper we discuss the income and poverty implications of expanded horticulture exports and changing supply chain structures for rural households in Sub- Saharan African exporting countries. We put together the economic arguments; distinguish different channels through which rural households are affected; provide evidence from three comparative case-studies on high-value horticulture exports; and derive implications for policy makers, private investors, and the development aid community.

Automated design of ligand responsive RNA devices

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