The paper analyzes the role of counter-cyclical (CC) payments in stabilizing farm incomes and investigates whether the payments could affect farmers planting decisions. Our analysis, based on representative farmer approach, finds that CC payments provide a relatively modest enhancement to farm...

The studies in this report analyze the effects of decoupled payments in the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform (FAIR) Act on recipient households, and assess land, labor, risk management, and capital market conditions that can lead to links between decoupled payments and production...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

Lack of protection from downside risk has been posited as one explanation for sluggish technology uptake among subsistence agricultural households in the developing world. Access to credit and insurance is thought to be a stimulant to technology adoption where new methods are riskier but higher...

In this paper, we examine how China, the world’s largest rice producer and consumer, would affect the international rice market if it liberalized its trade in rice and became more fully integrated into the global rice market. The impacts of trade liberalization are estimated using a...

During the Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011, millions of people suffered from hunger because food had become expensive. To cope with this problem, the governments of several countries decided to establish public food reserves in order to stabilize domestic prices. In this paper we develop a...

I have contended for some years that the principal economic problem facing commercial agriculture is instability (Tweeten 1989, p.30). Instability potentially threatens not only farmers' financial viability but also consumers' food security, given the desire for stable food consumption in the...

The commercial farm problem has been defined as an excess of farm output over utilization at "satisfactory" prices. Evidence of farm production in excess of market outlets has been apparent in declining farm commodity prices and net incomes, growing stocks of farm products, or large Government...