Suchergebnisse

The price of nearly every agricultural commodity sharply increased in 2008, creating a global food price bubble. At their peaks in the second quarter of 2008, world prices of wheat and maize were three times higher than at the beginning of 2003, and the price of rice was five times higher (Figure 1-3). The surge in food prices has become a major political concern because of its role for inflation, its impacts on the whole economy, and because of adverse effects on the wage earning poor and middle class. The price developments can help reduce urban – rural income gaps in the aggregate, but some groups in rural areas lose and others gain. The issue is not only one of too fast increases in prices, but one of risky volatility and of inappropriate policy responses around the world posing threats for free trade and possibly for political stability in some countries. In China, Consumer Price Index (CPI) kept increasing in 2008. CPI increased 8.5% in April 2008, a monthly record in 12 years. The increases from food, vegetable, livestock prices are the main reasons behind the CPI increase.

China has experienced dramatic economic transformation and is facing the challenge of ensuring steady agricultural growth. This study examines the crop sector by estimating the supply response for major crops in Henan province from 1998 to 2007. We use a Nerlovian adjustment adaptive expectation model. The estimation uses dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) panel estimation based on pooled data across 108 counties. We estimate acreage and yield response functions and derive the supply response elasticities. This research links supply response to exogenous factors (weather, irrigation, government policy, capital investment, and infrastructure) and endogenous factors (prices). The significant feature of the model specification used in the study is that it addresses the endogeneity problem by capturing different responses to own- and cross-prices. Empirical results illustrate that there is still great potential to increase crop production through improvement of investment priorities and proper government policy. We confirm that farmers respond to price by both reallocating land and more intensively applying non-land inputs to boost yield. Investment in rural infrastructure, human capacity, and technology are highlighted as major drivers for yield increase. Policy incentives such as taxes and subsidies prove to be effective in encouraging grain production. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1 ; DSGD; EPTD

From at least the sixth century A.D. onward, China maintained centralized control of large water projects, developed them as state enterprises, and managed them with its vast Confucian bureaucracy. The revolutionary states which succeeded late imperial China, first the Republic of China (1911-1949), and especially the People's Republic of China (1949-present) did not change these essential features of water policy (Hucker, 1994). During the 1980's, however, China, began to move away from the planned economy and embraced the global market economy. China retained the structural central command of the national economy, its central bureaucracy, and its planning of titanic state water projects. National governments embarked upon massive water-control and water-supply projects, establishing an unprecedented national presence in distant areas. Such large-scale water development assured the arid regions of much greater and more dependable water supplies, thus attracting unprecedented economic and demographic growth. The development of large-scale irrigation since 1950s has brought higher yields and new development, but created serious water shortage problems and environmental consequences, such as dried up rivers and lakes, declining groundwater levels and land subsidence, salinization and water pollution (Jiao, 2004).

IFPRI3; ISI; DCA; Capacity Strengthening; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies ; EPTD ; PR

The Ugandan coffee industry is facing some serious challenges, including low international prices in the international coffee market, aging coffee trees and declining productivity, and, more recently, the appearance of coffee-wilt disease, which have all contributed to the decline in both the quantity and value of coffee exports. The government of Uganda, through the Uganda Coffee Development Authority (UCDA), in 1993/94 started a coffee-replanting program to both replace coffee trees that were old or affected by coffee-wilt and expand coffee production into other suitable areas in northern and eastern Uganda. This program seems to be helping to both combat the industry's problems and reverse the declining trends. However, the UCDA announced in 2004 that it was withdrawing from the replanting program in the 2004/05 season (it had supported nursery operators and purchased and distributed free seedlings to farmers), so the program's achievements may not last. This paper estimates the economic returns (benefit–cost ratio) of the coffee-replanting program, particularly replanting with clonal varieties, and analyzes the welfare implications of the decision to withdraw. We find that the internal rate of return (IRR) and benefit–cost ratio are very high, about 50 percent and 3.7 respectively, suggesting that the replanting program in Uganda is very beneficial to the livelihoods of coffee farmers, the coffee sub-sector, and the economy as a whole. The largest benefits occur in the central region, where the bulk of coffee is grown, followed by the eastern and western regions. The largest return on investment occurs in the eastern region, followed by the central and western regions. Sensitivity analyses show that the results (that is, the net benefits) are robust with respect to the assumptions made, including demand and supply elasticities and level of domestic consumption. Although the results are sensitive to farm production costs and coffee yields, the program still improves welfare. Taken all together, the results suggest that if the government withdraws from the replanting program without putting place adequate alternative measures to ensure the program's sustainability, welfare will be severely reduced in coffee-growing areas." -- from Authors' Abstract ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; Theme 9; Subtheme 9.2; GRP32 ; DSGD; EPTD

"From a theoretical perspective crop yields should tend to converge over time and space as: growth in yield potential exhibits diminishing returns; an increasing share of farmers shift to using high yielding varieties (HYVs); barriers to the free flow of knowledge and information are removed; and significant investments continue to be made in supporting institutions whose mandates include facilitating and accelerating the cross-border flow of improved agricultural technologies. Using a new, sub-national crop yield database for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) we examine whether convergence is indeed occurring, and discover it is not. On the contrary, there is evidence of divergence. We test three hypotheses that might help account for this finding: that technology generation has been biased towards production in more-favored production systems leaving behind persistent pockets of production in more marginal lands; that rainfall patterns have changed in ways that exacerbate yield divergence, and that technology spillover across borders remains more problematic than within-country spillover. We find evidence to support all three of these hypotheses. Further work is needed to assess the relative importance of these sources of yield divergence both across and within LAC. As anticipated, rainfall variability is poorly linked to the variability of irrigated crop yields, but more strongly linked to variability in rainfed crops. The results suggest while some countries and regions within countries forge ahead with crop yield improvements there are many areas, often in smaller countries, where the livelihoods of many farmers - and likely a disproportionate share of LAC's rural poor - continue to be constrained by low-productivity agriculture. There remains significant work ahead for national governments and for publicly-funded regional and international agricultural technology institutions to remedy this situation." -- Authors' Abstract ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; GRP3; Theme 9; GRP38 ; EPTD; DSGD

IFPRI3; ISI; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; ; EPTD ; PR

Weather shocks and natural disasters, it has been argued, represent a major threat to national and international security. Our paper contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflict by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan at different geographical and time scales between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict. In the future the risk is expected to magnify in a range of 21 to 30 percent under a median scenario, taking into account uncertainties in both the climate projection and the estimate of the response of violence to temperature variations. Extreme temperature shocks are found to strongly affect the likelihood of violence as well, but the predictive power is hindered by substantial uncertainty. Our paper also sheds light on the vulnerability of areas with particular biophysical characteristics or with vulnerable populations.