Supermarkets are traditionally viewed by development economists, policymakers, and practitioners as the rich world's place to shop. The three regions discussed here have the great majority of the poor on the planet. But supermarkets are no longer just niche players for rich consumers in the...

Rice production in Africa has tended to be low-yielding, geographically dispersed, and uncompetitive against low-cost Asian imports, even when protected by high freight costs and substantial trade barriers. Skyrocketing prices in world markets in 2007-08 were a shock to African consumers,...

A revolution in food systems — food supply chains upstream from farms, to the food industry in the midstream segments of processing and wholesale and in the downstream segment of retail, then on to consumers — has been under way in the United States for more than a century and in developing...

This paper analyzes price formation on the world's rice market using simple supply and demand models as a start, but moving to "supply of storage" models - a staple of commodity-market analysis for more than half a century - to explain hoarding behavior and its subsequent impact on prices. The...

A powerful historical pathway of structural transformation is experienced by all successful developing countries, and this Working Paper presents the results of new empirical analysis of the process. Making sure the poor are connected to both the structural transformation and to the policy...

Food prices are a key signal about what is happening to food security, and two dimensions are important: their average level (and whether this is rising or falling in the long run) and their volatility. Food price instability slows down economic growth and the structural transformation that is...

Most poor people in developing countries still live in rural areas and are primarily engaged in low productivity farming activities. Thus pathways out of poverty are likely to be strongly connected to productivity increases in the rural economy, whether they are realized in farming, in rural...

Food security in Asia and the Pacific presents a frustrating paradox. At one level, huge progress has been made in the past half century in bringing most of the population out of poverty and hunger. Measured by the key determinants of food security -- improved availability, access, utilization...

Book Reviewed: Transforming Agrarian Economies: Opportunities Seized, Opportunities Missed by Thomas Tomich, Peter Kilby and Bruce Johnston