China’s economic reforms, which began in 1978, resulted in remarkable income growth, and urban Chinese consumers have responded by dramatically increasing their consumption of meat, other livestock products, and fruits and by decreasing consumption of grain-based foods. Economic prosperity, a...

In the decade of the 1990s, China’s feed sector became increasingly privatized, more feed mills opened, and the scale of operation expanded. Capacity utilization remained low and multi-ministerial supervision was still prevalent, but the feed mill sector showed a positive performance overall,...

This paper examines the incentive of atomistic agricultural producers within a specific geographical region to differentiate and collectively market products. We develop a model that allows us to analyze the market and welfare effects of the main types of real-world producer organizations, using...

The successful expansion of the U.S. crop insurance program has not eliminated ad hoc disaster assistance. An alternative currently being explored by members of Congress and others in preparation of the 2007 farm bill is to simply remove the “ad hoc” part of disaster assistance programs by...

We analyze the impact of trade liberalization, removal of production subsidies, and elimination of consumption distortions in world sugar markets using a partial-equilibrium international sugar model calibrated on 2002 market data and current policies. The removal of trade distortions alone...

This study provides a comparative economic analysis of the primary production of pork and its marketing channel in Spain and the United States. The focus on Spain is due to the profound growth and transformation of its pork sector over the last 20 years, compared with other major players in the...

This paper studies how the strength of intellectual property rights (IPRs) affects investments in biological innovations when the value of an innovation is stochastically reduced to zero because of the evolution of pest resistance. We frame the problem as a research and development (R&D)...