Towards regional food security in southern Africa: a (new) policy framework for the agricultural sector

In the southern African Region (SAR) large populations, mainly concentrated in rural areas, face food insecurity and poverty. Food insecurity is intensified by adverse weather conditions and droughts which impact negatively on farm level food production throughout the region. Agriculture constitutes an important economic sector in the majority of countries in the region. This is measured as share of agricultural value added to the GDP and as agriculture's share in employment. Based on these facts alone, it must be obvious that sustained agricultural performance will play a significant role in the improvement of food security and livelihoods in the region. However, food security is not only attained in rural areas and by the consumption of home produced food stuffs. Urbanisation is expected to increase dramatically over the next few decades and feeding the urban masses, at affordable prices, must be considered to be a high future priority for governments in the region. Food security must not be viewed as an agricultural issue per se. The drive to food self sufficiency through domestic agriculture production in many countries in the region did not enable these countries to feed their own population. Food security should rather be defined as the acquirement of sufficient and nutritious quantities of food (Sen, 1981, Poverty and Famines: An essay on Entitlement and Deprivation). An approach, whereby attention is given to the macro level availability of food, access to income streams as well as improved production capacity to acquire food at a household level and the utilisation of nutritious food, should therefore be guiding food security policies (SADC: FSTAU, 1997, A Strategic Framework for Food Security in the Region). This broader view emphasises household level poverty reduction, economic development and growth as important components of a food security strategy (World Food Summit, Rome, 1996). An important issue which therefore needs to be explored is whether agriculture does have the potential to contribute to economic processes, which will support broad based development and food security. This paper is intended to argue the importance of agricultural development for food security in the region and to develop a diverse policy framework to strengthen this new, more comprehensive role of agriculture in the region.     

Explaining smallholder maize marketing in southern and eastern Africa: The roles of market access,technology and household resource endowments

Research on household food grain sales behavior in developing countries has tended to focus on the roles of market access and prices to explain why many rural households do not sell staple crops, though recent literature suggests that low household asset endowments may also be key constraints. We use econometric analysis of panel data from smallholders in Kenya, Mozambique, and Zambia to inform the design of public investments that will enable smallholders to increase their maize sales. Results show that investments that raise farm-level productivity and land access are an essential complement to investments that improve market access.     

Stabilizing food markets in eastern and southern Africa

A major challenge for agricultural policy in Africa is how to address the market instability-related causes of low farm productivity and food insecurity. This paper highlights structural changes affecting the behavior of food markets in eastern and southern Africa and discusses their implications for the design of strategies to stabilize food prices. These changes include (1) an increasing trend in maize prices toward import parity levels, reflecting an emerging structural maize deficit in much of the region; (2) increasingly diversified food consumption patterns in both rural and urban areas; (3) highly concentrated marketed maize surplus, which have largely unrecognized implications for the magnitude of price risk faced by most farm households; and (4) the strategic interactions between private and public marketing actors leading in some cases to heightened market instability and food crises. In the prevailing dual market environment now characterizing most of the region, greater coordination, transparency, and consultation between private and public market actors is needed to achieve reasonable levels of food price stability and predictability.     

Implementing the World Food Summit Plan of Action: organisational issues in multi-sectoral planning

Despite current ideological and philosophical objections to planning, it survives in new forms, generating Policy Framework Papers, Poverty Assessments or multi-sectoral Action Plans to implement the resolutions of international conferences. The World Food Summit Plan of Action will generate a new wave of such plans. History shows that the road to multi-sectoral planning is littered with organisational elephant-traps. The traps can be avoided, however, by learning the lessons of past experiments with multi-disciplinary or multi-sectoral planning. The literatures on integrated rural development, multi-sectoral nutrition planning, farming systems research, national food security planning, poverty planning and industrial organisation are all of help. They suggest that the key is to establish a task culture, characterised by co-operative goal definition, a high degree of participation, supportive leadership, and strong integration of planning and implementation. A ten point action plan is derived from these principles for follow-up to the World Food Summit.     

Food security implications of staple food substitution in Sahelian West Africa

Low-income households in Sahelian West Africa face multiple shocks that risk compressing their already-low food consumption levels. This paper develops a multi-market simulation model to evaluate the impact of common production and world-price shocks on food consumption of vulnerable groups in Sahelian West Africa. Empirical analysis confirms that poor households bear the brunt of ensuing consumption risks, particularly in closed markets, where trade barriers restrict imports, and the poor find themselves in a bidding war with richer consumers for limited food supplies. In the absence of trade, a drought that reduces domestic rainfed cereal production by 20% would compress already low calorie consumption of the rural poor by as much as 15%, four times as much as other household groups. Conversely, a 50% spike in world rice prices hits the urban poor hardest, compressing calorie consumption by up to 8%.Policy responses need to focus on two basic mechanisms that can help to moderate this pressure – consumer substitution among staple foods and trade. Immediately south of the Sahel, coastal West African countries enjoy higher rainfall, dual rainy seasons, more stable staple food production based on root crops (cassava and yams) as well as frequent double cropping of maize.Our simulation results suggest that regional trade in maize, yams and cassava-based prepared foods like gari and attieké could fill over one-third of the consumption shortfall resulting from a major drought in the Sahel. Increasing substitutability across starchy staples, for example through expansion of maize, cassava and sorghum-based convenience foods, would further moderate consumption pressure by expanding the array of food alternatives and hence supply responses available during periods of stress.     

Smallholder market participation: Concepts and evidence from eastern and southern Africa

This paper reviews the evidence on smallholder market participation, with a focus on staple foodgrains (i.e., cereals) in eastern and southern Africa, in an effort to help better identify what interventions are most likely to break smallholders out of the semi-subsistence poverty trap that appears to ensnare much of rural Africa. The conceptual and empirical evidence suggests that interventions aimed at facilitating smallholder organization, at reducing the costs of intermarket commerce, and, perhaps especially, at improving poorer households’ access to improved technologies and productive assets are central to stimulating smallholder market participation and escape from semi-subsistence poverty traps. Macroeconomic and trade policy tools appear less useful in inducing market participation by poor smallholders in the region.     

Feeding the famine? American food aid and the GMO debate in Southern Africa

The inclusion of genetically modified maize in food aid shipments to Southern Africa during the 2002 food crisis rekindled debates over agricultural biotechnology. As the region edged ever closer to famine – putting the lives to some 14 million Africans at risk – corporate pundits, government officials and biotech’s critics debated the health and environmental dangers posed by the new technology.By situating the decision to send genetically modified maize to Southern Africa in the context of US–European debates over agricultural biotechnology, it becomes clear that the promotion of biotechnology has nothing to do with ending hunger in the region. Indeed, American food aid shipments to Southern Africa have little to do with the famine at all. Instead, I argue that US food aid policy following the 2002 crisis was intended to promote the adoption of biotech crops in Southern Africa, expanding the market access and control of transnational corporations and undermining local smallholder production thereby fostering greater food insecurity on the Continent.     

Labor productivity and employment gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation – labor allocation and labor productivity – in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating their labor. These measures are similar to national accounts-based measures that are typically used to characterize structural change. However, because agricultural workers supply far fewer hours of labor per year than do workers in other sectors in all of the countries analyzed, productivity gaps shrink by half, on average, when expressed on a per-hour basis. Underlying the productivity gaps that are prominently reflected in national accounts data are large employment gaps, which call into question the productivity gains that laborers can achieve through structural transformation. Furthermore, agriculture’s continued relevance to structural change in Sub-Saharan Africa is highlighted by the strong linkages observed between rural non-farm activities and primary agricultural production.     

确定农村最低生活保障对象中的问题

确定农村最低生活保障对象是农村最低生活保障制度顺利实施的一个重要问题。目前在确定农村最低生活保障对象时，存在着三个问题，一是部分困难人口未能纳入最低生活保障范围，特别是大量无收入、生活困难的农村老人与儿童急需救助；二是农村经济发展的不平衡性，使部分经济发达地区的低保覆盖率要高于落后地区；三是在确定农村最低生活保障对象中，监督与回馈制度不健全。解决这三个问题，将有效地保障农民群众的基本生活权益，促进农村社会经济稳定协调发展。     

Growth options and poverty reduction in Ethiopia – An economy-wide model analysis

This study focuses on which agricultural subsectors are important in Ethiopia’s economic growth and poverty reduction and what kind of agricultural and nonagricultural growth is needed to achieve the millennium development goal of halving the incidence of poverty by 2015. A spatially disaggregated, economy-wide model was developed, enabling the analysis of growth and poverty reduction linkages at national and regional levels using national household surveys, agricultural sample surveys, geographic information systems, and other national and regional data. The study reveals that agriculture can play a central role in decreasing poverty and increasing growth in Ethiopia. Within the agriculture, growth in cereals and other staple crops should receive priority. Agricultural growth also requires concurrent investments in roads and other market conditions. At the subnational level, similar growth rates within agricultural subsectors have different effects on poverty, necessitating regionally based strategies for growth and poverty reduction.     

The impact of agricultural research on productivity and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa

While it is widely recognized that agricultural research is a key driver of broad-based technological change in agriculture that benefits the poor in many different ways, little is known about its aggregate impacts on productivity growth and poverty reduction in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using a polynomial distributed lag structure for agricultural research within a simultaneous system of equations framework, this paper first demonstrates that agricultural research contributes significantly to productivity growth in SSA. Productivity growth is again shown to raise per capita incomes, with income increases finally having significant poverty-reducing effects. With an aggregate rate of return of 55%, the payoffs to agricultural research are also impressive. Agricultural research currently reduces the number of poor by 2.3 million or 0.8% annually. While the actual impacts are not large enough to more than offset the poverty-increasing effects of population growth and environmental degradation, the potential impacts of agricultural research are far greater. Apart from low research investments, SSA faces several constraints outside the research system that hinder realization of potential research benefits. The results show that doubling research investments in SSA would reduce poverty by 9% annually. However, this would not be realized without more efficient extension, credit, and input supply systems.     

Agricultural productivity growth in Brazil: Large and small farms excel

The long-standing debate on the relationship between farm size and productivity has been generally limited by the range of farm sizes evaluated and the definition of productivity. In this paper we use data from three Brazilian agricultural censuses to address these issues. In particular, we introduce a wider distribution of farm sizes than presently available from the literature and we employ total factor productivity (TFP) as our performance measure. In doing so, we test which farm size class had the highest TFP levels in 1985 and 2006, how factor productivity growth varied within and across farm size classes between those years, and which policy or factor had the greatest productivity enhancing effect. When examining TFP growth, we move beyond the common decomposition into technical and efficiency changes by identifying the complete distribution of farm productivity performances. We find that by 2006 a U-shaped distribution of productivity over farm sizes had emerged. Considerable 1985–2006 TFP growth differences are prevalent; positive rates for the majority accompany stagnant or negative rates for some. Public education investments were associated with faster productivity growth regardless of farm size, while technical assistance’s positive effect and credit’s negative effect were associated with larger farm sizes. The role of specialization varied by size.     

The roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in the context of population growth and land use intensification in Africa

This article reviews the past and potential future roles of land tenure reforms and land markets in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as responses to population growth in the process of land use intensification and livelihood transformation. The farm size distribution and the existence of an inverse relationship (IR) between farm size and land productivity in SSA and the implications of this relationship for efficiency and equity are investigated. More secure property rights and removal of restrictions on land markets have the potential to create both efficiency and equity benefits, but there are high risks of elite capture of large land areas with inefficient and inequitable outcomes. This situation is the case not only in land-abundant areas but also in urban and peri-urban areas where increasingly larger proportions of people will make their living. Increasing population pressure in densely populated rural areas contributes to more rapid rural–urban migration, and creating alternative livelihood opportunities for the migrating youth population is essential to achieving economic development with social stability.     

关于西部地区缓解城乡就业矛盾对策探讨

随着西部大开发战略的提出,西部迎来了经济发展的机遇和挑战。西部有丰富的人力和资源优势,但由于生产力水平低,人口、资源和环境矛盾突出,城乡就业问题异常严重,成为西部地区社会、经济、文化落后的重要原因。缓解城乡就业是推动西部地区经济腾飞,促进人口、资源和环境协调发展的关键。     

Impact of contract farming on land productivity and income of maize and potato growers in Pakistan

While the positive income effect of contract farming is well established in the literature, the heterogeneity of effects for different crops has not been widely investigated. This study compares the income and productivity effects of large-scale contract farming under contract schemes for potatoes and maize in Pakistan. In the area of the study, maize is a common staple crop, widely available in the market, while the potatoes produced by contract farmers are a special variety not sold in the market. We find that potato contracting is associated with significantly higher income for participating farmers, while maize contracting has no association with either income or productivity. We found no negative association between contract participation and income from other sources. Taken together, these results show a higher total household income for potato contract farmers. We also show unique evidence that potato contract farmers tend to employ more skilled workers under a salary system for the management of farms, which implies that contract farming may have positive spillover effects in the skilled labor market. Neither scheme, however, is associated with larger employment of agricultural labor for simple tasks.     

Food insecurity,gender, and international migration in low- and middle-income countries

The determinants of migration have been widely studied but research has rarely addressed the roles of food insecurity and gender in the migration decision process. To address these gaps, we examine these relationships for 135,078 individuals across 94 low- and middle-income countries. We use a series of binary-choice models with sample selection and data from the 2014–2015 waves of the Gallup World Poll Survey, which includes the first global measure of individual-level food insecurity. Results, which are robust, indicate that food insecurity is an important determinant of both migration intentions and preparations, and the probability of migration intentions increase monotonically with the severity of food insecurity, and the probability of migration preparations decrease. These relationships also differ significantly by gender and level of gross national income. Evidence suggests a need for increased coordination between the international food security and migration policy agendas.     

A comparative political economic analysis of maize sector policies in eastern and southern Africa

Maize sector policies in eastern and southern Africa are characterized by a large and often growing presence of the state. Yet the scope, scale, and modalities of state activities vary substantially across countries. Drawing on data from Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, and Mozambique this article compares the relative degree of state intervention in the maize sector. We show that relative preferences for output market subsidies, input market subsidies, trade restrictions, or non-interventionist approaches reflect the interplay of interest group lobbying, patronage networks, and ethnic and regional political affiliations. These relationships have deep historical roots and have often been intensified in the context of the emergence of multiparty politics. We show that interventionist orientations in output markets and trade do not translate into better performance or welfare outcomes. Input subsidy preferences produce more ambiguous welfare results, when the opportunity costs are not fully accounted for.     

Agricultural policy reforms and food security in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan

This paper provides an overview of agricultural policy reforms and their impact on food security in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Owing to increasing hostility in regional trade among the countries of Central Asia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, like their neighbors, have chosen to follow a path of food self-sufficiency, which has biased their agricultural systems towards grain production. The paper finds that the land reforms in these two countries, which have dismantled the state farms, have resulted in reduced productivity of crops and declining food availability at the household level. It argues that reversing this trend will require increased investment in rural infrastructure and agricultural research to improve crop yields, and in the short-term, food security interventions to protect the poor and vulnerable.     

澳大利亚新西兰农产品环境贸易措施初探

澳大利亚、新西兰两国近年来与中国的贸易关系不断升温,本文关注的是两国在农产品贸易领域的环境措施。首先明确农产品环境贸易措施的概念,并与"绿色贸易壁垒"这一概念进行区别。接着从管理机构、法律法规、技术标准和进口程序方面介绍两国的环境贸易措施,最后指出中国的对策。     

Agricultural pesticides and land use intensification in high,middle and low income countries

We study levels and trends in agricultural pesticide use for a large cross-section of countries using FAO data for the period 1990–2009. Our analysis shows that a 1% increase in crop output per hectare is associated with a 1.8% increase in pesticide use per hectare but that the growth in intensity of pesticide use levels off as countries reach a higher level of economic development. However, very few high income countries have managed to significantly reduce the level of intensity of their pesticide use, because decreases in insecticide use at higher income levels are largely offset by increases in herbicide and fungicide use. The results also show very rapid growth in the intensity of pesticide use for several middle income countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Cameroon, Malaysia and Thailand. Complementing our analysis with data from the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC), we show that hazardous pesticides covered in the PIC procedure are more weakly regulated in lower than in higher income countries. We discuss the policy challenges facing developing countries with a rapid growth in pesticide use and recommend a four-pronged strategy, including an environmental tax on pesticides with revenues allocated to long-term investments in awareness building, the development of integrated crop management methods and the setting of food safety standards. The interactions between these measures should help contribute to the effectiveness of the overall strategy package.