In 2016, the People’s Republic of China removed its support prices for maize and started destocking its large public reserves of maize. This paper investigates what would happen if China were to also eliminate its support prices for rice and wheat and reduce its public stocks of these two...

The objectives of this paper are (i) to assess the actual economic implications of the new European banana policy on prices, consumption and trade in Germany within a theoretical and quantitative analysis; (ii) to elaborate the welfare implications of the European banana market policy on the...

For decades, earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies reduce national and global economic...

China has always strived for self-sufficiency in farm products, particularly staple foods. Its rapid industrialization following its opening up to global markets during the past two decades has been making that more difficult, and its accession to the WTO may add to that difficulty. New...

A common-agency lobbying model is developed to help understand why North America and the European Union have adopted such different policies towards genetically modified food. Our results show that when firms (in this case farmers) lobby policy-makers to influence standards and consumers and...

The first generation of genetically modified (GM) crop varieties sought to increase farmer profitability through cost reductions or higher yields. The next generation of GM food research is focusing also on breeding for attributes of interest to consumers, beginning with ‘golden rice’, which...

The paper investigates the effects of the entry price scheme (EPS) for a specific sector of agriculture: fresh fruit and vegetables. The analysis is conducted on the EU prices of tomatoes, lemons and apples for some of the main competing countries on the EU domestic markets: Morocco, Argentina,...

The problems of Japanese agriculture – in particular low productivity and the prevalence of part-time farmers and small plots have been evident for the past 50 years. The high level and distortionary nature of agriculture support imposes burdens on consumers and taxpayers, undermines the...

Information on export restrictive measures was collected from 16 countries for the period 2007 to 2011 or 2012 depending on the country. The data indicate that export measures were applied across the whole spectrum of agricultural and food products, but grains, oilseeds and vegetable oils were...