Agricultural commercialization, or the transition from food to cash crops, has gained increasing attention over the past few decades. Plans for developing world farmers to focus on labor-intensive cash crops, to exploit their natural comparative advantage, typically depend on stable food markets...

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank suggest that agricultural growth is the most effective way to fight (child) malnutrition. Whether this is indeed the case is still very much debated, partly because there is little direct evidence on this topic. Using a dataset of 50...

Prepared for the COMESA policy seminar on“Variation in staple food prices: Causes, consequence, and policy options”,Maputo, Mozambique, 25-26 January 2010under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Marketing Project (AAMP)

Paper to be presented at the Comesa policy seminar“Food price variability: Causes, consequences, and policy options"on 25-26 January 2010 in Maputo, Mozambiqueunder the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Markets Project (AAMP)

The effects of population, income, prices of major inputs, and exchange rate of the U.S. dollar on the prices of three key agricultural and food commodities (feed grains, oilseed, and fruits) for 13 low-income countries and seven middle-income countries were evaluated. Given the short time...

Global food demand is estimated from population projections of the United Nations and food supply is projected from Food and Agriculture Organization yield data to quantify the global food supply-demand balance for 2025 and 2050. The eight food categories examined account for 95 percent of...

This paper argues that recent increases in international food prices worsened poverty incidence in Indonesia, even though many poor farmers benefited. This conclusion is based on the application of a multi-sectoral, multi-household general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy. The...

The global food crisis of 2007-08 has focused attention on food prices, pushing the topic to the top of the agenda of international organizations. For policymakers in sub-Saharan Africa, however, food prices have been an issue of economic importance and political sensitivity for decades. Of...

The upheaval in the global food market involving the dramatic increases in crop prices and riots prompted by unaffordable food to many of the world’ s poorest has placed agriculture back in the public eye. Questions are being raised surrounding what has happened, why, and what can be done....

This paper explores the impacts of China's growth in the international markets of agricultural products. These impacts are important because they are related to two different ongoing discussions about the role of China in the world economy. One of these discussions have to do with China as a...