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The Government of Uzbekistan (GoU) has recently adopted a policy to mechanize the cotton harvest as part of its drive to modernize the agricultural sector. Under Uzbekistan’s state-order system it is compulsory for many farmers to grow cotton. They are contractually obligated to produce stipulated quantities that are annually set by the government, and must sell these to the GoU at a price fixed by the government. Almost all cotton in Uzbekistan is harvested by hand, even though mechanization existed during the Soviet period. An estimated 2.2–3 millio

Agriculture is the dominant sector of the economy, contributing a third of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) and about half of Rwanda’s export earnings. The government of Rwanda has therefore made agricultural development a priority and allocated significant resources to improving productivity, expanding the livestock sector, promoting sustainable land management, and developing supply chains and value-added activities. At the same time, Rwanda’s agriculture sector faces a series of challenges. Agriculture is dominated by small-scale, subsistence farming under traditional agricultural practices and rain-fed agriculture. As a result, average crop yields are low compared with potential yields, and exposed to risks such as weather related shocks and pest and disease outbreaks. The purpose of this report is to assess existing risks to the agriculture sector, prioritize them according to their frequency and impacts on the sector, and identify areas of risk management solutions that need deeper specialized attention. Three levels of risks are assessed: production risks, market risks, and enabling environment risks to selected supply chains. The report takes a quantitative and qualitative approach to risks. The report is structured as follows: chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two provides an overview of Rwanda’s economy and the role and structure of the agriculture sector. Agriculture sector risks (production, market, and enabling environment risks) for the selected food crops, export crops, and livestock are analyzed in chapter three. Analysis of the adverse impacts of agricultural risks at aggregate and provincial levels, along with a stakeholder risk assessment and a discussion of particularly vulnerable groups, is presented in chapter four. Chapter five prioritizes identified risks, discusses potential solutions areas, summarizes feedback from consulted stakeholders, and recommends solutions areas for further assessment.

Almost a decade after large land-based investment for agriculture increased sharply, opinions on its impact continue to diverge, partly because (positive or negative) spillovers on neighboring smallholders have never been rigorously assessed. Applying methods from the urban literature on Mozambican data suggests that changes in the number and area of large farms within 25 or 50 kilometers of these investments raised use of improved practices, animal traction, and inputs by small farmers without increasing cultivated area or participation in output, credit, and nonfarm labor markets; or, once these factors are controlled for, yields. The limited scope and modest size of the estimated benefits point toward considerable unrealized potential. The paper discusses ways to systematically explore the size of such potential and the extent to which it is realized.

The performance of Senegal’s agricultural performance exemplifies the impact of unmanaged risk on productivity among vulnerable smallholder crop producers and pastoralists. The government of Senegal has historically responded to drought and other shocks with direct financial support to farmers as well as general assistance to the rural population. The World Bank, with support from the group of eight (G-8) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Equipment (MARE), commissioned the present study. The objective of this assessment was to assist the government of Senegal to: (1) identify, analyze, quantify, and prioritize principal risks facing the agricultural sector; (2) analyze the impact of these risks; and (3) identify and prioritize appropriate risk management interventions that may contribute to improved stability, reduced vulnerability, and increased resilience of agricultural supply chains in Senegal. This report presents a summary of the assessment’s key findings. Chapter one gives introduction. Chapter two provides an overview of the agricultural sector in Senegal and a discussion of key growth constraints. An assessment of the main agricultural risks is presented in chapter three. Chapter four analyzes the frequency and severity of highlighted risks and assesses their impact. Chapter five presents some stakeholder perceptions of risks and evaluates levels of vulnerability among various livelihood groups. The study concludes in chapter six with an assessment of priorities for risk management and a broad discussion of possible risk management measures that can help to strengthen the resiliency of agricultural supply chains and the livelihoods they support.

Agricultural risk management is a central issue that Mozambique faces in development, and multiple stakeholders have analyzed this challenge, sometimes with different terminology and focusing on varying aspects. The government of Mozambique has adopted the strategic plan for agricultural development (PEDSA 2010-19) that focuses on: (i) increasing the availability of food in order to reduce hunger through growth in small producer productivity and emergency response capacity; (ii) enlarging the land area under sustainable management and the number of reliable water management systems; (iii) increasing access to the market through improved infrastructures and interventions in marketing; and (iv) improving research and extension for increased adoption of appropriate technologies by producers and agro-processors. The World Bank’s agriculture sector risk assessment takes a holistic approach and relies on long time-series historical data to arrive at an empirical and objective assessment of agricultural risks and their impacts on Mozambique. This assessment will form the basis of the second step, solution assessment, whose final findings will inform National Investment Plan for the Agrarian Sector in Mozambique (PNISA). This document considers the many aspects of assessing risk in the Mozambican agriculture sector. Chapter one gives introduction and context. Chapter two introduces the major characteristics of the agricultural system leading into chapter three, which presents a comprehensive picture of the risks that exist in the sector. Chapter four, in quantifying the risks that have been observed, comments on the losses that have been incurred by the sector because of production risks, whereas chapter five provides a qualitative discussion of how risk has an effect on the different stakeholders present in the sector. Chapter six delves into the risk prioritization carried out by the team and then comments on various management measures. The report concludes with chapter six, in which recommendations are provided for improving risk management in Mozambique.

Africa is estimated to have great potential for agricultural production, but there are a number of constraints inhibiting the development of that potential. Spatial data are increasingly important in the realization of potential as well as the associated constraints. With crop production data generated at 5-minute spatial resolution, the paper applies the spatial tobit regression model to estimate the possible impacts of improvements in transport accessibility in East Africa. It is found that rural accessibility and access to markets are important to increase agricultural production. In particular for export crops, such as coffee, tea, tobacco, and cotton, access to ports is crucial. The elasticities are estimated at 0.3–4.6. In addition, the estimation results show that spatial autocorrelation matters to the estimation results. While a random shock in a particular locality would likely affect its neighboring places, the spatial autoregressive term can be positive or negative, depending on how fragmented the current production areas are.

The contribution of women to labor in African agriculture is regularly quoted in the range of 60 to 80 percent. Using individual-disaggregated, plot-level labor input data from nationally representative household surveys across six Sub-Saharan African countries, this study estimates the average female labor share in crop production at 40 percent. It is slightly above 50 percent in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda, and substantially lower in Nigeria (37 percent), Ethiopia (29 percent), and Niger (24 percent). There are no systematic differences across crops and activities, but female labor shares tend to be higher in households where women own a larger share of the land and when they are more educated. Controlling for the gender and knowledge profile of the respondents does not meaningfully change the predicted female labor shares. The findings question prevailing assertions regarding substantial gains in aggregate crop output as a result of increasing female agricultural productivity.

Cambodia’s rice harvests have been rising significantly since 2005, powered by improved and expanded irrigation and attractive farm gate prices. In 2010, the Cambodian government announced an export target of 1.0 million tons of milled rice by 2015. This analysis, which updates reports prepared in 2009 and 2011, seeks to identify short-term policy measures that can assist Cambodian exporters in boosting exports in the near term. This report examines new and expected investments in the larger rice mills and polishing factories, export trends, recent changes in milling costs, and provides a look at logistical costs and some alternatives. Additionally, import trends are examined in two current markets - the European Union (EU) and Russia, and in three other key markets - Indonesia, the Philippines, and China. Finally, an analysis is provided of the current Thai rice policy which impacts on local prices and investment interests by Thai rice exporters.

Agriculture and agribusiness play an important role in the Zambian economy, contributing around 20 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in recent years and about 12 percent of national export earnings. Agriculture employs nearly 70 percent of the labor force and remains the main source of income and employment for most of the people living in rural areas. The objective of the Zambia agribusiness indicators (ABI) country report is to examine factors that have affected agricultural productivity, market access, and the policy environment for agriculture in Zambia. This report presents findings of a data collection exercise carried out to compile a set of pilot ABI for Zambia. The pilot indicators presented are based on a review of the literature, government statistical bulletins, and primary interviews in the seed, fertilizer, mechanization, agricultural finance, and transport subsectors. The resulting indicators are presented in matrix form, together with notes indicating the specific data source (or sources) used for each indicator. A set of questionnaires was developed for this part of the exercise based on guidelines. Perception indicators on the quality of road infrastructure and other transport sector issues were added to supplement the checklist guidelines. The anticipated impact of the presentation of country performances will be to raise the competitiveness of African agriculture by bringing into sharper focus measures of how individual countries are transitioning towards a more commercial agriculture. This report consists of following seven chapters: chapter one gives introduction; chapter two presents access to and use of improved seed; chapter three focuses on fertilizer access and availability; chapter four focuses on access to farm machinery and tractor hire services; chapter five presents access to agricultural and agri-enterprise finance; chapter six gives cost and efficiency of transport in Zambia; and chapter seven presents policy and enabling environment for agribusiness development.

In the future scenario for livestock development, there is a continuing role for smallholder producers, particular for dairy and small ruminants, relying heavily on grass and crop-residues, however in a growth mode, intensifying production, and enhancing the efficiency of resource use (less land, labor and feed resources per unit product). In particular improving the efficiency of converting feed into milk and meat will be critical to increase their income. Ensuring that happens will require technical solutions, in ensuring that feed rations are adequately balanced with the appropriate feedstuffs of adequate quality, and institutional solutions on how to provide smallholders access to high quality information and reliable supplies of sufficient quality feeds. Investment strategies will need to be purposefully tailored to fit these specific contexts. This study assesses where the demand for feed is likely to change the most, and where investments in feed are most likely to increase animal productivity and improve the livelihoods of those who raise livestock. The study focuses on smallholder ruminant-based livestock systems because they have potentially major transformative effects on the livelihoods of producers and others engaged in the related value chains. While pig and poultry enterprises typically play an important role in livelihoods at very low input levels, such as backyard scavenging poultry, they tend to be replaced very quickly by larger scale commercial units. In India for instance, broiler production moved from a few hundred birds per unit to units with a weekly turnover of ten to twenty thousand between 2001 and 2006.

Agriculture in Tanzania accounts for 28 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and employs 80 percent of its labor force. The sector is also an important source of export revenues. The data and findings presented in this report provide a summary of the performance of the agriculture sector in Tanzania using a set of indicators covering six areas. These are: 1) access to and availability of certified seed; 2) availability of and access to fertilizer; 3) access to farm machinery, particularly tractor hire services for land preparation; 4) access to agricultural and agro-enterprise finance; 5) the cost and efficiency of transporting agricultural commodities; and 6) measures of policy certainty and uncertainty as perceived by private investors and the effects these have on the enabling environment for producers and agribusinesses. The Agribusiness Indicators (ABI) team conducted interviews with Government agencies, private firms (fertilizer importers, seed companies, tractor importers and distributors, transporters), commercial banks, farmer-based organizations, donors, and Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs). The ABI program is pilot testing an initial set of indicators on the ease (or difficulty) of operating agribusinesses in African countries. The indicators are used to assess whether the countries have an enabling environment that is conducive to agribusiness investment, competitiveness, and ultimately agriculture-led growth.

Mozambique, the only Lusophone country covered in the agribusiness indicators initiative, has had a turbulent history since independence. Civil unrest over some 20 years and frequent drought in southern Mozambique, coupled with floods near the many waterways that transect the country (mainly east-west), have inhibited an agricultural transformation. Even so, Mozambique could be a regional breadbasket. The country has much potentially usable arable land, along with access to river water for irrigation in many agricultural production zones, particularly in central and northern Mozambique. Sesame, pigeon peas, and cashew exports are significant and rising, not to mention exports of industrial crops such as cotton, leaf tobacco, and sugarcane, yet production of grain and most other food crops remains stagnant. Irrigated area is way below what is possible and needed to increase yields and total agricultural output.

Because agriculture is the economic backbone of most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia, any meaningful sustainable development program in the continent must therefore be anchored in the sector. The concept for this study on agribusiness indicators was based on the vital role that agribusiness plays in agricultural development. The study focuses on agribusiness indicators (ABI) to identify and isolate the determining factors that lead private investors and other stakeholders to participate in agribusiness and to engage in discourse regarding its development. A more thorough empirical understanding of these determinants in turn can usefully inform the types of policy reforms that can promote agribusiness in Africa. In Ethiopia, the ABI team focused on the following success factors: a) access to critical factors of production of certified hybrid seeds, fertilizer, and mechanical input; b) enabling environment in terms of access of credit and transportation; and c) government expenditures on agriculture, and trade and regulatory policies that currently influence the agribusiness environment. The factors and indicators that the research team has included in this study are not exhaustive but rather are intended to serve as a pilot that could be scaled up to include more variables and countries. The findings of the study revealed the dominant role of the government in the seed and fertilizer markets. In the seed sub-sector, perennial shortages of both basic and certified seeds have greatly limited agricultural productivity in Ethiopia.

Reforestation measures for degraded lands, strategies for the sustainable management of forest resources, and agroforestry practices that incorporate trees into farming systems are increasingly demonstrating their promise for producing commercialized tree products. Although the level of investment so far has remained modest, the challenge is to find ways to scale up promising investments in a way that will have a clear impact at the landscape level. These types of investments can help achieve the triple wins of climate-smart agriculture: increased incomes and yields, climate change adaptation and greenhouse gas mitigation.Market trends are promising for a wide range of tree-based technologies, including tropical fruits, cashews, honey, timber and wood products, lipids, gums and resins, tree crops, and agroforestry systems. In many cases, African entrepreneurs, farmers, civil society, and governments have responded dynamically to the widespread challenge of land degradation. The continent is dotted with landscapes where production of trees on farms and in managed forests has grown dramatically to meet market and subsistence needs; sustainable agricultural practices and revegetation have restored soils and watersheds; and key conservation areas are being protected. However, this is not happening at the scale required by societal needs in Africa. In part, this is due to a lack of strategic cooperation and coordination between private sector investors and land managers (who are focused on realizing profitable opportunities and meeting their own needs) and public and civil society actors (who are focused on restoring forest cover and ecosystem services). Such coordination is only possible when the biophysical potential for landscape restoration, private sector investment opportunity and incentives, and societal demand for multiple benefits converge. Much can be learned from examples of large-scale landscape restoration in Ethiopia, Kenya, Niger, Tanzania, and Zambia, and the variable roles of the private sector, farmers, government, and civil society in supporting and undertaking investment.

This report is the outcome of assessment and is intended as an advisory note to the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) and Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) to enable them to identify a strategy and potential public investments to improve current risk-management practices in the rice supply chain. This report identifies the major risks facing the rice supply chain, ranks them in terms of their potential impact and frequency, and offers a framework for improving current risk-management practices. The recommendations and findings will provide a basis for follow-up planning work by the Government of Guyana (GoG), the World Bank, and other development partners. The findings and analysis of this initial assessment are based on a methodology designed by the Agricultural Risk Management Team (ARMT) for assessing risks in agricultural supply chains. This report provides an indicative list of potential solutions to address the dominant risks in the rice supply chain; however, the assessment or evaluation of the individual solutions was beyond the scope of this exercise. To ensure the greatest return on future public investments in implementing risk management solutions, GRDB and MoA need to undertake an exhaustive cost-benefit assessment of different options. This will enable MoA to identify and implement the necessary activities to reduce the vulnerability of the rice supply chain in Guyana.

This report is the final product of a country case study prepared in the framework of the comparative analysis of organization and performance of cotton sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, a study published by the World Bank in 2008. The objective of the overall study was to carry out a comparative analysis of the links between sector structure and observed performance outcomes on a sample of nine of the major cotton exporting countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, and draw lessons from each country's experience that can provide useful guidance to policy-makers, industry stakeholders, and interested donors agencies in the design of future cotton sector reform programs. This paper describes and reviews the situation of the cotton sector of Cote d'Ivoire, as well as the reforms that the sector has undergone since the mid-1990s.

This report is the final product of a follow-up study undertaken after the completion of the comparative analysis of organization and performance of cotton sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, a study published by the World Bank in 2008. The objective of this complementary study is to assess the advantages and disadvantages of the main available technologies to separate the lint from the raw cotton, roller ginning and saw ginning, and carry out an economic analysis of the respective benefits of these two technologies for cotton producing countries of Sub-Saharan Africa. The study shows that the choice of ginning technology is an important factor of performance and is in turn influenced by the cotton sector structure. The type of ginning technology also has an impact on lint quality, and, as roller ginning is less damaging to the fiber than saw ginning, it can generate a price premium. The overall economic advantage of roller gins vs. saw gins appears to be significant in the Sub-Saharan African context, and likely to increase in the future as the demand for quality is becoming more and more stringent. Thus, although there are technical and organizational issues to address in order to fully capture the benefits of the technology, the introduction of roller ginning is likely to improve the competitiveness of African cotton and facilitate the transition towards more competitive cotton sectors.

A 'bottom up' regional Computable General Equilibrium Model (CGE) model for Vietnam is constructed for 28 commodities and 8 regions (using a GSO input-output table for 2005). The model is used to analyze the recent dramatic increases in the world price of rice on the regional economy of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese policy response to limit exports. Although results show limited 'pro-poor' outcomes, the CGE model and a micro-simulation (using 2006 VHLSS - Vietnamese Household Living Standard Survey data) show that recent rice export quotas resulted in falls total rural savings as measured by the difference in total income less total production cost and consumption of rice. The structure of the paper is as follows. Section two provides the background and reviews existing studies in Vietnam that have tried to estimate the welfare impact of government policies in rice market. Section three describes the methods and data. The results from the CGE model and micro-simulation on household data are discussed in section four. Section five offer concluding remarks.

This paper empirically explores the political-economic determinants of why governments choose to tax or subsidize trade in agriculture. The authors use a new data set on nominal rates of assistance (NRA) across a number of commodities spanning the last five decades for 64 countries. NRAs measure the effect on domestic (relative to world) price of the quantitative and price-based instruments used to regulate agricultural markets. The data set admits consideration of both taxes and subsidies on exports and imports. The authors find that both economic and political variables play important roles in determining the within-variation in the NRA data. Based on results the authors offer a number of data-driven exploratory hypotheses that can inform future theoretical and empirical research on why governments choose to tax or subsidize agricultural products an important policy question that is also one of the least understood by scholars.

This paper focuses on the political economy of United States (U.S.) farm policy since the Uruguay round trade negotiations concluded in 1994 and established the World Trade Organization (WTO). The continued ability of the powerful farm lobby in the U.S. to elicit support in the political arena is evident from this analysis. Yet there have been some substantial changes in policy that have reduced their distortionary effects, as well as some setbacks to liberalizing reform. New Doha round commitments could put further constraints on subsidies provided by some U.S. policy instruments. And despite the ability of the farm lobby to retain its support programs through 2012, there are several political uncertainties about the alignments that have allowed U.S. farm support to endure.

The purpose of this report is to provide a detailed analysis of the behavior of cropping output in agriculture between 1992 and 2006 in Vietnam at both the national and regional level. There are several motivations. The report focuses our analysis on trends with respect to how rapidly output was growing in real terms. The next parts of the chain will link output to farm incomes more directly. First this requires information on the value-added from crop production (gross output value less the cost of intermediate inputs) in order to convert gross revenue into real net income. Second, the report will have to convert 'real farm profits' measured in producer prices, to 'real incomes' that link to farmer welfare, utilizing the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for rural households. Third, the period 1992 through 2006 has been one of considerable change in the economic and policy environment that might affect the growth of agriculture. In this report, the report focus only on the trends in real output at the national and sub-regional level, and save the latter two links of the chain for future work.

There is much in common between the agricultural sectors of the United States and Canada. This chapter begins with a brief background on the two sectors, then reviews their histories of farm policy developments before reporting new estimates of rates of assistance to their farmers and their consequences for taxpayers and consumers. This is followed by an explanation of the politics behind the evolution and gyrations in farm policies in the two countries, and some speculation on the prospect for reform. Since the policy histories and their effects in the two countries are somewhat different, they are discussed sequentially in those sections.

This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financial crisis on farm households in two of the region’s most affected countries, Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed householdlevel survey data collected before and after the crisis began. Although the nature of the shocks in the two countries were similar, the impact on farmers’ income (particularly on distribution) was quite different. In Thailand, poor farmers bore the brunt of the crisis, in part because of their greater reliance on the urban economy, than did poor farmers in Indonesia. Urban-rural links are much weaker in Indonesia. Farmers in both countries, particularly those specializing in export crops, benefited from the currency devaluation. Although there is some evidence that the productivity of the smallest landholders declined over the period in question, it is difficult to attribute this directly to the financial crisis. At least in Thailand, a rural credit crunch does not seem to have materialized. Now that the East Asian financial crisis has waned, its impact on two of the region’s most affected countries, Indonesia and Thailand, can be more readily assessed. Agriculture is the major employer in these economies, yet little is known about how farm households weathered the crisis. Hyperbolic news reports notwithstanding, many farmers surely benefited from the exchange rate depreciation. Other effects of the crisis, however, may not have been so sanguine. Overall, one would expect considerable variation in the impact of the crisis within the rural sector. Of particular interest to policymakers, given the implications for the design of safety net programs and balanced rural development, is how the rural poor fared relative to better-off households. This article uses detailed household survey data from Indonesia and Thailand collected before and after the onset of the 1997 financial crisis to explore its effect on farm production and income, especially its differential impact on the poor.

According to Myint's "vent-for-surplus" theory, development of the economies of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand from the nineteenth century on depended on the natural advantage of large tracts of unused "empty land" with low population density and abundant natural resources of the type typically found in Southeast Asia and Africa at the outset of Western colonization. When these economies were integrated into international trade, hitherto unused natural resources (primary commodities the indigenous people had not valued) became the source of economic development, commanding market value because of high import demand in Western economies. The major delta of Chao Phraya River was the resource base of vent-for-surplus development with rice in Thailand; tropical rain forests filled that role in Indonesia and the Philippines with respect to the production of tropical cash crops. This basic difference underlay differences in the distribution of farm size: the unimodal distribution of peasants or family farms in Thailand and the coexistence of peasants and large estate farms or plantations specializing in tropical export crops in Indonesia and the Philippines. Differences in agrarian development were also shaped by different policies toward the elites preemption of unused land. Under Spanish colonialism, the elite preempted unused land in the Philippines wholesale, bifurcating land distribution between non-cultivating landlords and sharecroppers in lowland rice areas, and between plantation owners and wage laborers in upland areas. In Indonesia, the Dutch government granted long-term leases for uncultivated public land to foreign planters, but prevented alienation of cultivated land from native peasants, to avoid social instability. In Thailand, concessions were granted for private canal building, but the independent kingdom preserved the tradition of giving land to anyone who could open and cultivate it. Relatively homogenous land-owning peasants dominated Thailand's rural sector. As frontiers for new cultivation closed, the plantation systems initial advantage (large-scale development of land and infrastructure) began to be outweighed by its need to monitor hired labor. The peasant system, based on family labor needing no supervision, allowed Thailand's share of the world market in tropical cash crops to grow, as Indonesia and the Philippines lost their traditional comparative advantage. Moreover, land reform in the Philippines made land markets inactive, with resulting distortions in resource allocation and serious underinvestment in agriculture.