Agricultural Economics

In the past two decades, Japanese agriculture has been shrinking under policies of deregulation, with domestic production being replaced rapidly by imports, in which multinational agribusinesses are key players. Today there is an increasing presence of multinational corporations in Japanese rural sites. Dole Japan, a subsidiary of Dole Food Company, launched a domestic vegetable business in 2000 by organising their own franchise farms and distributing their products with the ‘I Love’ brand through their own supply chain. Although Dole Japan was expected to play the role of a ‘white knight’ in salvaging crumbling local agriculture, it has closed down some farm corporations in regions where it was not successful. Our focus in this article is on the interaction of (1) power, in which Dole Japan plays a dominant role in several rural sites, (2) market response (increasing demand for quality control and traceability), (3) political changes (deregulation), and (4) expectations from rural communities. We will also explore the limitations of the concepts of ‘domestic’ and ‘safety’ in sustaining agriculture and rural economies and will offer the concept of ‘locality’ as an alternative space of food politics.

This white paper aims to inform decision makers in academia, government, and industry of the range of potential opportunities likely to emerge in the animal health industry, and to identify technologies, products, and knowledge clusters critical to taking advantage of these opportunities. We have identified potential growth opportunities in the animal health industry based on a broad view of emerging and future industry trends and technologies. The technology and product opportunities are then matched against a range of future scenarios. The result is a portfolio of technologies, products, and knowledge clusters relevant for those scenarios, which can be a starting point for discussion about opportunities for the regional industry. Decision makers can begin with those opportunities to develop a vision for the region. Similarly, individual entities can themselves formulate strategies specific to their needs to manage the uncertain future.

تهدف هذه الورقة لتحليل ودراسة العلاقة بين التنمية والاستثمار والتمتع بالحقوق الاقتصادية من واقع حالة مصر.فالحقوق الاقتصادية تعد من أهم حقوق الانسان على الاطلاق.وعلى الرغم من الاصلاحات المتخذة لزيادة تمتع المواطن المصرى بحقوقه الاقتصادية،الا أن التمتع بهذه الحقوق ما زال متدنيا بالمقارنة بالعديد من الدول.فحوالى 43.9% من المصريين يعيشون على أقل من دولارين فى اليوم،ونحو 16.7% منهم يعيشون تحت خط الفقر.وتوصى الورقة بضرورة تحسين مناخ الاستثمار والاهتمام بالصناعات الصغيرة والمتوسطة واتباع سياسات تحقق العدالة والانصاف وأيضا تدعيم وتطوير شبكات الأمان الاجتماعى وذلك لزيادة تمتع المواطن المصرى بحقوقه الاقتصادية

Projection shows the impacts of climate change on agricultural sustainability and relevant livelihood sustainability is highly vulnerable in Malaysia. Here mitigation is necessary but adapting to future risk is more important for immediate and long term action to larger number of stakeholders in local scale. Adaptation policy has different levels and approaches that related with different challenges. Several countries has been developed their adaptation approach in their own way. Malaysia is on the way to develop its adaptation policy for last couple of years. Here this paper focuses the guidelines and crucial policy relevant issues, related to the potential socioeconomic vulnerability among stakeholders, that need to examine carefully while determining the adaptation approach to climate change in Malaysia.

The paper presents a review and critique of the most widely used trade models based on computable general equilibrium (or CGE) models. The emphasis throughout is on methodology. The paper provides concise analytical arguments explaining the
fundamental weaknesses of CGE models, paying particular attention to the way that CGE models conceptualise and masure welfare. The authors also show that the manner in which the World Bank uses CGE modelling is highly problematic, making implausible assumptions about elasticities, the exchange rate, and macro causality. World Bank models assume that the most central macro-economic indicators do not change in response to any liberalisation scenario. The authors argue that this is negligent, especially in developing countries with historically large trade deficits, significant debt problems, and a large informal economy with underemployment in modern sectors. The authors also identify a particular inconsistency inherent in the use of ‘Armington’ specifications of elasticities in CGE models. They show that, even if the Bank’s welfare measures and macro causal scheme are accepted, the welfare gains that liberalisation is supposed to induce are estimated incorrectly in LINKAGE, GTAP, and other trade models that adopt the popular Armington specification of imperfect competition between trading partners.

Agricultural science and technology (S&T) is under great scrutiny. Reorientation towards more holistic approaches, including agroecology, has recently been backed by a global international assessment of agriculture S&T for development (IAASTD). Understanding the past and current trends of agricultural S&T is crucial if such recommendations are to be implemented. This paper shows how the concepts of
technological paradigms and trajectories can help analyse the agricultural S&T landscape and dynamics. Genetic engineering and agroecology can be usefully analysed as two different technological paradigms, even though they have not been equally successful in influencing agricultural research. We used a Systems of Innovation (SI) approach to identify the determinants of innovation (the factors that influence
research choices) within agricultural research systems. The influence of each determinant is systematically described (e.g. funding priorities, scientists’ cognitive and cultural routines etc.). As a result of their interactions, these determinants construct a technological regime and a lock-in situation that hinders the development of agroecological engineering. Issues linked to breaking out of this lock-in situation are finally discussed.

Harmful non-indigenous species (NIS) introductions lead to loss of biodiversity and serious economic impacts. Government agencies have to decide on the allocation of limited resources to manage the risk posed by multiple NIS. Bioeconomic modelling has focused on single species and little is known about the optimal management of multiple NIS using a common budget. A comprehensive bioeconomic model that considers the exclusion, detection and control of multiple NIS spreading by stratified dispersal and presenting Allee effects was developed and applied to manage the simultaneous risk posed by Colorado beetle, the bacterium causing potato ring rot and western corn rootworm in the UK. A genetic algorithm was used to study the optimal management under uncertainty. Optimal control methods were used to interpret and verify the genetic algorithm solutions. The results show that government agencies should allocate less exclusion and more control resources to NIS characterised by Allee effects, low rate of satellite colonies generation and that present low propagule pressure. The prioritization of NIS representative of potential NIS assemblages increases management efficiency. The adoption of management measures based on the risk analysis of a single NIS might not correspond to the optimal allocation of resources when other NIS share a common limited budget. Comprehensive bioeconomic modelling of multiple NIS where Allee effects and stratified dispersal is considered leads to a more cost-effective allocation of limited resources for the management of NIS invasions.

An extraordinary development of the central nervous system distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other biological species and has bestowed upon him the ability to grossly alter the structure and function of natural systems to such an extent that the biosphere – a sphere of all living organisms – is now virtually transformed into the ‘noosphere’ – a world controlled by the mind of man. Thus, more than the legal or technological tools, it is the human mind that ultimately holds the key to the conservation of the biosphere or its possible destruction. Hence, the ethical positions adopted by man in his dealings with nature are important determinants of the fate of the biosphere, including that of the human species itself. Such ethical positions may be ‘anthropocentric’, where conservation is human-centred and no other component is assigned any intrinsic value, or they may be ‘biocentric’/ ‘ecocentric’ to varying degrees, where intrinsic value is recognized in other organisms or in the ecosystems as well. Against the backdrop of these ethical positions, we analyze in this paper the myths and folklores, as well as cultural beliefs, customs and practices of indigenous communities of Northeastern India such as tribals, fisherfolk, hunter-trappers, plantation workers, farmers and so forth, and attempt to trace the ethical basis of various resource utilization and conservation strategies adopted by them. The present-day threats and pressures leading to an erosion of these traditional value-systems are also described and discussed.

PRESENTACIÓN

El trabajo que aquí se presenta aborda la situación del avance de la soja en Uruguay en el contexto del desarrollo mundial y regional del complejo sojero. El interés por analizar esta temática surge de la necesidad de sistematizar y organizar el estado de situación del agronegocio sojero, de forma tal de dar cuenta de los principales impactos que está generando.

Su objetivo es aportar insumos para enriquecer el debate público en torno a los principales cambios que han atravesado la agricultura extensiva y el campo uruguayo en los últimos años, focalizándose en su cultivo vedette, la soja. A riesgo de redundar con anteriores trabajos de los mismos autores , se pretende ahondar en la descripción y el análisis del fenómeno de la sojización.

Para ello, en este trabajo se presenta un abordaje general sobre el desarrollo del capital en la agricultura a nivel mundial, analizando sus principales características, el rol de las empresas transnacionales y los impactos más significativos del modelo predominante. Se describe la organización del complejo sojero, así como la predominancia de los principales actores empresariales, tanto en el mundo como en la región y en el Uruguay. Se finaliza detallando los principales impactos socioeconómicos que ha provocado la sojización en Uruguay a nivel de empleo, estructura agraria, distribución de la riqueza, aportes impositivos y costos ambientales.

El trabajo fue realizado en base a una vasta revisión bibliográfica y entrevistas a informantes calificados. Su redacción tuvo lugar entre los meses de agosto y diciembre de 2008.

Lejos de pretender presentar verdades absolutas, asumiendo lo inacabado de las principales conclusiones y convencidos de que es sólo la crítica profunda la que permite avanzar hacia interpretaciones más certeras de la realidad, es que se invita a una lectura cuestionadora de este texto.

This paper looks at the evolution of the terms of trade between commodities and manufactures in the twentieth century. A statistical analysis of the relative price series for 24 commodities and of eight indices reveals a significant deterioration in their barter terms of trade over the course of the twentieth century. This decline was neither continuous, nor was it distributed evenly among individual products, however. The data show that the far-reaching changes that the world economy underwent around 1920 and again around 1980 led to a stepwise deterioration which, over the long term, was reflected in a decline of nearly 1% per year in aggregate real prices for raw materials.

Government agencies lack robustmodelling tools to manage the spread of invasive alien species (IAS). In this paper, we combine optimal control and simulation methods with biological invasion spread theory to estimate the type of optimal policy and switching point of control efforts against a spreading IAS.We employ information-gap (info-gap) theory to assess how the optimal solutions differ from a policy that is most robustly immune to unacceptable outcomes. The model is applied to the potential invasion of the Colorado potato beetle in the UK. Under no uncertainty, we demonstrate that for many of the parameter combinations the optimal control policy corresponds to slowing down the invasion. The info-gap analysis shows that eradication policies identified as optimal under no uncertainty are robustly the best policies even under severe uncertainty, i.e. even if they are likely to turn into slowing down policies. We also show that the control of satellite colonies, if identified as optimal under no uncertainty, will also be a robust slowing down policy for IAS that can spread by long distance dispersal even
for relatively ineffective control measures. The results suggest that agencies adopt management strategies that are robustly optimal, despite the severe uncertainties they face.

Motion planning problem which considers the search of a robot path from an initial to a goal configuration has always been of keen interest. Recent advances have influenced sampling-based motion planning algorithms to be used in  disparate areas such as humanoid robotics, automotive manufacturing, architecture, computational geography, computer graphics, and computational biology. The technical approach is organized around three main areas: 1) the development of efficient nearest neighbor searching
techniques for spaces arising in motion planning; 2) the development of uniform sampling techniques on these spaces to allow resolution completeness in sampling-based planning algorithms; and 3) the development of guided sampling techniques for efficient exploration on such spaces. We discuss the dynamic adaption of RRT and have suggested theoretical results and analysis of its performance based on its tuning parameter (the radius of visibility) on the dynamically distributed domain formulated on each traversal.

Knowledge-intensive activities are bound by imperfections that limit the provision of incentives, particularly asymmetric information about inputs and unclear definition of outputs. Thus, performance-based incentives are not possible. We then model a contract in which the firm can use the delegation of decision rights to provide incentives. The main argument is that a fine-tuned allocation of decision rights reduces the information rents of a knowledge provider by offsetting her strategic use of the information advantage. We show that when the firm owns strong complementary assets to leverage the provider's knowledge, the delegation of decision rights can fully resolve the limitations due to asymmetric information. When this condition is not met, the provider is offered full autonomy, but it is optimal for the firm to let the most knowledgeable providers go. We also discuss the generality of our approach.

In this paper, the global agricultural land use model Kleines Land Use Model is coupled to an extended version of the computable general equilibrium model (CGE) Global Trade Analysis Project in order to consistently assess the integrated impacts of climate change on global cropland allocation and its implication for economic development. The methodology is innovative as it introduces dynamic economic land-use decisions based also on the biophysical aspects of land into a state-of-the-art CGE; it further allows the projection of resulting changes in cropland patterns on a spatially more explicit level. A convergence test and illustrative future simulations underpin the robustness and potentials of the coupled system. Reference simulations with the uncoupled models emphasise the impact and relevance of the coupling; the results of coupled and uncoupled simulations can differ by several hundred percent.

Indian agriculture today is under a large crisis. An average farmer household’s returns from cultivation would be around one thousand rupees per month. The incomes are inadequate and the farmer is not in a position to address the multitude of risks: weather, credit, market and technology among others. Social responsibility of education, healthcare and marriage instead of being normal activities add to the burden. All these would even put the semi-medium farmer under a state of transient poverty. The state of the vast majority of small and marginal farmers and agricultural labourers is worse off. An extreme form of response to this crisis is the increasing incidence of farmers’ suicides. In such situations, employment programmes can provide some succour to the agricultural labourers and also perhaps to the marginal and small farmers. The least that one can expect from such programmes is rent-seeking. Some recent evidences indicate that one can develop institutions to address this. It is this that gives a glimmer of hope in the larger story of distress, despair and death. Incidentally, this paper provides some estimates from National Sample Survey (NSS) region wise information on returns to cultivation and on some aspects of farmers’ indebtedness based on the 33rd schedule 59th round survey of 2003. It provides suicide mortality rate for farmers, non-farmers and age-adjusted population across states of India from 1995-2004. Link is provided for the IGIDR Working Paper version.

Poor returns to cultivation and absence of non-farm opportunities are indicative of the larger socio-economic malaise in rural India. This is accentuated by the multiple risks that the farmer faces – yield, price, input, technology and credit among others. The increasing incidence of farmers’ suicides is symptomatic of a larger crisis, which is much more widespread. Risk mitigation strategies should go beyond credit. Long term strategies requires more stable income from agriculture, and more importantly, from non-farm sources. Private credit and input markets need to be regulated. A challenge for the technological and financial gurus is to provide innovative products that reduce costs while increasing returns. The institutional vacuum of organising farmers needs to be addressed through a federation of self-help groups (SHGs) or alternative structures.

Water balance techniques have been extensively used to make quantitative estimates of water resources and the impact of man's activities on the hydrologic cycle. On the basis of the water balance approach, it is possible to make a quantitative evaluation of water resources and its dynamic behaviour under the influence of man's activities. In this paper, an attempt has been made to describe the methodologies to understand and evaluate the various recharge and discharge components of ground water balance equation and to establish the recharge coefficient with a view to work out the ground water potential of an area.

Η ιστορική έρευνα έχει στραφεί από καιρό στην έρευνα των αγροληπτικών συστημάτων όπως εμφανίζονται στον ελλαδικό χώρο κατά τα νεώτερα χρόνια (17ος-20ός αιώνας). Παρότι πολλά ερωτήματα μένουν ανοιχτά, διαθέτουμε ήδη μια πλούσια βιβλιογραφία. Αντίθετα, καμία προσπάθεια πλήρους ταξινόμησης και συστηματικής ανάλυσης της μορφής και ιδίως της λειτουργίας των « ζωοληπτικών » συστημάτων στο πλαίσιο του γεωργο-κτηνοτροφικού νοικοκυριού και της περιβάλλουσας τοπικής αγροτικής οικονομίας δεν έχει ακόμα επιχειρηθεί. Στην ανακοίνωση προτίθεμαι να επιχειρήσω μια πρώτη μορφολογική και λειτουργική ταξινόμησή τους και κυρίως να τα συσχετίσω με λειτουργικά ομόλογα αγροληπτικά συστήματα και την ταξική διάρθρωση των αγροτικών κοινωνιών στις οποίες αναφέρονται, με βάση τις διασωθείσες αρχειακές μαρτυρίες που προσφέρουν αφενός τα εκδομένα νοταριακά αρχεία και οι διάσπαρτες ιστορικές μαρτυρίες των ξένων περιηγητών (16ος-19ος αιώνας) και αφετέρου οι πιο συστηματικές σύγχρονες μελέτες της Ελληνικής υπαίθρου (19ος- 20ός αιώνας).

The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate.

Using original survey data collected at the county (commune) level, we examine the relationship between insecurity and welfare. Correcting for unobserved heterogeneity at the commune level, we …nd that insecurity is associated with lower incomes and health status in all our analysis, and it associated with lower school enrollment and higher infant mortality in regressions. Results are robust to the inclusion of shocks potentially a¤ecting both welfare and insecurity. We further …nd a signi…cant association between insecurity and the provision of certain public services, notably schooling and health care. A similar relationship is found with the placement of development projects. Taken together, the evidence suggest that insecurity is an important determinant of welfare in the country studied.

Using detailed survey data from Uganda, this paper examines whether co¤ee producers sell to itinerant traders or directly to markets, where they can get a higher price but must incur a transport cost. We …nd that selling to the market is more likely when the quantity sold is large and the market close by. Wealthy farmers are less likely to sell to the market, possibly because the shadow value of their time is higher. But if they have a large quantity of co¤ee for sale, they are more likely to sell it to the market. They are also more likely to travel to a distant market. These …ndings are consistent with their better ability to pay for public transportation. We …nd no evidence that the decision to sell at the farm-gate is driven by a self-control motive.