In emerging markets for high-value food products in developing countries, processing companies search for efficient ways to source raw material of consistent quality. One widely embraced approach is contract farming. But relatively little is known about the appropriate design of contracts,...

The increasing use of agricultural contracts and processor concentration raises concerns that processors may offer lower contract prices in absence of local competition. This study examines the price competitiveness of marketing and production contracts depending on the availability of...

This paper determines the demand for a forestry program amongst rural households in western Kenya. It is based on a field survey with 277 households, using a stratified random sampling approach. The study follows attribute based method to elicit farmers’ preferences. Demand is measured in...

This paper analyses the economics of biofuel production and the implications that the accelerating growth in biofuel production in many countries could have on agricultural markets. It shows that production costs of ethanol and biodiesel differ significantly across countries and feedstock crops....

In most urban cities across Australia, water restrictions remain the dominant policymechanism to restrict urban water consumption. The extensive adoption of waterrestrictions over several years means that Australian urban water prices have consistently not reflected the opportunity cost of water...

This study examines the dynamic effects of grain prices and energy prices on catfish feed prices and the price of food-sized catfish at the farm level. Using the autoregressive distributed lag model and bounds testing procedure, a long-run relationship between feed and farm prices and their...

This study uses panel data at suburb level to estimates the elasticity water demands inPerth, Australia from 1995 to 2005. After deriving the consumer’s water demand under anon-linear budget constraint, we estimate the water demand model, which accounts forhow water (and other purchased goods)...

Recent increases in the price of crude oil have led to a rise in the prominence of corn-based ethanol as an alternative source of energy. As a result linkages have been established between commodity and energy prices. The aim of this study is to determine if soybeans, corn, wheat, oil, and...

This paper considers the effects of granting a fishermen's sales organization exclusive rights to sell unprocessed fish. On the assumption that the fishermen's monopolyis able to discriminate between plants and end use alternatives in its pricing policy, the conditions for profit maximization...

Production costs for fresh Atlantic groundfish and scallop processing are examined using direct observation, linear regression analysis, and cost accounting. Assuming that management chooses a production technique where marginal costs are constant over a wide range of production due to...