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There is a growing body of literature exploring governance in regional value chains (RVCs) in Africa. Agro-processing RVCs are of particular interest, as this is where the manufacturing capabilities of most African countries lie. The research on RVCs in Africa highlights governance by lead firms and government actors as an important aspect in determining the structure and outcomes within these RVCs. Using the global value chain (GVC) analytical framework, this article analyses governance in the poultry RVC in South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The paper finds that the poultry RVC is a bilateral oligopoly, where the lead firms are supermarkets and large poultry producers with exclusive rights to multi-territorial breeding rights. The article highlights that both large producers and the supermarkets play an important role in the formation and structure of the poultry RVC, with important implications for regional integration and industrialisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic trade flow in China is an indispensable factor affecting food availability to the public. The aim of this study is to focus on the cost of domestic trade within China and the dietary health of Chinese residents. Based on the China-regional input-output tables and the CHNS micro-database, we calculated China's domestic trade costs and Healthy Eating Index (HEI) of Chinese urban and rural residents. We find that domestic trade costs are negatively correlated with residents' whole grain and mixed beans, vegetables, fruits, beef, mutton, poultry, and aquatic products consumption, having a significant negative influence on residents' dietary quality score. Domestic trade costs can influence residents' food consumption structure by affecting income and traditional market scores. Domestic trade costs have a greater negative influence on the dietary quality of rural residents, low-income residents, and elderly residents. The results suggest that reducing domestic trade costs increased residents' food consumption and improved their dietary quality. Increasing the people's income and stimulating traditional markets can alleviate the decline in dietary quality of the population caused by an increase in domestic trade costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the study is to characterize the market in terms of asymmetry between the dynamic increase in imports and the less pronounced increase in exports from Poland, with particular emphasis on various categories of agricultural products. The research methodology involves the analysis of trade data from Eurostat and a comprehensive review of scientific and specialized literature. The comparative analysis is centered around categories such as cereals, vegetable oils, meat, and dairy products. Key findings indicate a significant increase in the import of agricultural products from Ukraine, especially corn, coupled with a modest rise in exports from Poland. Additionally, a decline in exports for certain categories suggests that part of production has been retained on the domestic market. The main conclusions emphasize the need for effective strategies to manage surplus agricultural products, including the promotion of alternative markets and the development of diversification initiatives for the agricultural sector. Given the challenges stemming from the war in Ukraine, an appropriate approach to shaping agricultural policy becomes crucial for the sustainable development of the sector.

The aim of the article is to identify changes in the production and export of poultry from Poland and the factors influencing the development of this market. The main methods used to achieve the aim of the study are comparative analysis over time, structure analysis, and correlation coefficient. The study mainly used annual data collected by the Ministry of Finance and Statistics Poland. During the period under study, Poland was self-sufficient in poultry production, which increased, except for 2021, when it decreased, which was primarily caused by the very dynamic transmission of avian influenza in poultry. A progressive process of production concentration is observed in the sector. The share of farms keeping the smallest flocks of broiler chickens decreased, and the share of farms keeping the largest flocks increased. Imports of poultry products in relation to exports were small. Production was much higher than domestic market demand. About half of the production was exported. Between 2014 and 2022, poultry meat and offal had the largest share in the export structure. One of the challenges for market development is the greater intensity of avian influenza, which directly or indirectly affects various participants in the supply chain. Therefore, there is a need to create plans for dealing with the appearance of avian influenza in poultry. In the case of export, the consequence of the occurrence of avian influenza in poultry may be the need to change some geographical export directions, which should be included in such plans. It is also necessary to prepare a plan for the management of surplus poultry in the event of a ban on ritual slaughter. The development scale creates a need for systematic research of this sector.

As a central hub for global commodity trade, the Asia-Pacific region has increasingly contributed to global economic growth. This study examines the impact of recently enacted mega Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in the region, namely, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). Employing the Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood (PPML) estimator and Poisson generalized estimating equations (GEE) within an Augmented Gravity Model with four-way fixed effects, this study analyzes trade data from 2003 to 2023 across 19 member countries and conducts endogeneity and robustness tests on the results. The empirical findings are unable to demonstrate that the main effects of RCEP and CPTPP have statistically significant impact on trade flows. However, the interaction effects of RCEP and CPTPP significantly boosted the bilateral trade flows (excluding non-agricultural exports) of overlapping member countries, particularly in agricultural exports, which increased by 21.81%. These results underscore the critical role of Asia-Pacific economic integration in facilitating trade cooperation and highlight the complexities that mega FTAs encounter in facing geopolitical issues. Despite political challenges, the RCEP and CPTPP positively affect trade relations and economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethical consumerism is one of this century's retail success stories and has continued to grow despite the global pandemic and economic contraction. Consumers worldwide are increasingly putting their money where their values are in purchases of food and drink, clothing, housing, and financial and other services. Understanding these consumers is key to competing successfully in markets for ethically sourced products and presents opportunities for reducing poverty in developing countries where food and agricultural production is the dominant economic activity, such as small island developing states (SIDS) in the Pacific. While ethical consumerism is an expanding research field, findings rarely are analysed in detail for market development. Rarer still is segmentation in terms of product attributes aimed explicitly at poverty reduction in slow-growth, emerging economies like those of the Pacific. Here we report a latent class cluster analysis of survey responses by ethically conscious Australian consumers (n = 637) associated with Oxfam, the development charity. Four distinct consumer segments were identified with implications for Pacific producers. Product origin and 'the story behind the product' were particularly important to these consumers. The findings provide practical insights to agricultural stakeholders in the Pacific and those similarly situated around the globe that are in need of new economic opportunities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of information and communication technology (ICT) has altered the way society operates things. ICT is used in various sectors, including agriculture. It can be used in the agricultural sector to distribute pricing and encourage agricultural commodity exports. The study aims to investigate the effect of ICT on cashew nut export in Benin using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. Data were collected over the period of 31 years (1990–2020) in Benin. The estimated results showed that mobile cellular telephone subscription is negatively and significantly correlated with cashew nut export in the short-run. However, in the long-run, it exhibits a positive and significant correlation. On the other hand, internet usage had no significant effect on cashew nut export in the short-run, but negatively influenced cashew nut export in the long-run. These results suggest that to increase its cashew nut export, the Beninese government should invest in technological infrastructure to improve internet access by reducing the cost of internet and increasing education that will allow farmers to better understand and use ICT.

Tea is an essential commodity for China's agriculture trade, which faces fierce competition in the global tea trade. The export share of tea in China has a smaller proportion than other products, which means that it can influence on the economic growth or otherwise. This study aims to examine the potential destination countries for China's tea trade in the international market and its impact on economic growth. In this study, the panel-based gravity model was applied by identifying the potential destination countries for tea by using data of bilateral trade between China and 78 importing countries from 2010 to 2020. The Autoregressive Distributive Lag (ARDL) from 1991 to 2020 was used to evaluate the effect of China's tea export on economic growth. The result confirmed that 39 countries were identified as a potential destination for China's tea trade. A positive and significant effect of the tea trade on the country's economic growth in the long and short run was also found, particularly through export activity. China needs to increase the production of tea and to establish relations with the identified potential destination countries for tea exports in order to achieve a higher level of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to examine the level of food security in Ukraine in comparison to global regions and European countries in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war. For this purpose, a variety of indicators were examined including population dynamics, food balance, FAO indicators, and the Global Food Security Index. The results show that in spite of its agricultural potential Ukraine is behind the global and European indicators of food security with the exception of fish products. Barriers to achieving high levels of food security include incomplete legislative reforms, inadequate funding, infrastructure deficiencies, corruption and non-compliance with standards. International cooperation and improved national and regional strategies are needed to overcome the consequences of the war.

As part of the process of structural transformation that countries go through in their development journey, the relative significance of agriculture as a sector typically shrinks over time. Nonetheless, the agricultural sector maintains its significance in terms of its trade potential and global employment prospects to this day. The extant literature largely neglects the impact of countries’ land resources on agricultural trade by emphasizing agricultural farm size and land productivity nexus. This justifies the exploration of the causal nexus between countries’ agricultural land resources and their agricultural exports.

China has been one of the most important sources of growth in global wine demand this century, accounting for 7% of the world's wine consumption and imports by 2017, or four times its 2005 shares. But China's per capita wine consumption peaked in 2012, has fallen every year since 2017, and in 2022 was one-third of its peak, and its imports have more than halved since 2017. Certainly, the COVID-19 disruption and associated slowdown in China's income growth would account for some of that. However, the fall in China's alcohol consumption began three years earlier, and between 2019 and 2022, the fall was considerably larger for wine (47%) than for spirits (17%) and beer (3%). Thus, wine's share of alcohol consumption in China fell by two-fifths over those three years. The article speculates on the reasons behind the dramatic downturn in this globally important market and finishes by imagining future trends and drawing implications for wine-exporting countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Research background: Past measures to increase food production in Nigeria, were not effective enough to curb food imports and increase food production thus leading to a deficit balance of payment for the country and a total neglect of the agricultural sector.

Are food prices more or less equalised across countries? In view of various barriers to trade (both naturally occurring and of a man-made nature) and currency gyrations, the answer would seem to be an unambiguous "No", but we show this question is worthy of further investigation. In order for the law of one price (LOP) to hold, domestic prices must respond one-for-one to changes in world prices and exchange rates, but this is usually prevented by variations in mark-ups and/or trade barriers. We use data on producer prices from the Food and Agriculture Organization to test for the LOP. The results give surprising support to the LOP: Market wedges appear to be insufficiently important to prevent food prices equalising over the longer term. The law of one food price seems to hold, at least as a first approximation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The profitability of U.S. meat producers and the utility of U.S. meat consumers are impacted by the trade of meat. USDA publishes the most prominent publicly available meat trade projections. This study finds USDA projections typically underpredict meat export volumes and overpredict meat import volumes. USDA projections outperform naïve projections for beef and pork exports, but naïve projections at times outperform USDA projections for chicken exports and beef and pork imports, especially at shorter horizons. USDA projections exclude variety cuts, which comprise a sizeable share of beef and pork exports. There remains room for improvement in projecting U.S. meat trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]