Agricultural Markets in Developing Countries

The history of agricultural markets in developing countries reflects attempts to establish the appropriate government responses to the inefficiencies created by incomplete institutional and physical infrastructure and imperfect competition. Government intervention in the 1960s and 1970s to resolve market failures gave way in the 1980s to market-oriented liberalization to "get prices right" and, more recently, to "get institutions right". But markets openness may accentuate the latent dualism of a modern, efficient marketing sector, accessible only to those with adequate scale and capital, alongside a traditional, inefficient marketing channel to which the poor are effectively restricted