Agricultural Markets

Millions are severely malnourished in a world where there is enough for all. Hunger and malnutrition stalk more than 3.1 billion people. Yet, widespread hunger in all its forms is a problem which has been largely solved at the macro level in today’s high-income, industrialized countries. Their “escape from hunger and premature death” is a fairly recent phenomenon. It began around 300 years ago, continued for most of the 20th century and is still ongoing today. The problems faced by ...

If the recent peaceful transfer of power in Madagascar heralds a new trend, then the Malagasy people can dream big. For decades, the exercise of economic-cum-political power in the hands of a tiny elite has held the entire nation hostage. Today, the high poverty rate—around 80% (2021) stands in stark contrast to the natural resource abundance of this huge enormous island. There is hope, however, that with political stability, the Plan d’Émergence Madagascar (PEM) President Andry R ...

Rwanda is famous for its remarkable socio-economic performance after the ravages of the Genocide against the Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994. Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has followed a state-led development model with stunning results. Despite these substantial accomplishments, Rwanda is still a low-income country with extensive poverty. Its agriculture is still of low productivity and highly vulnerable to climate change. Structural transformation has we ...

The transformative potential of regional market integration for a large trading bloc is well exemplified by the European Union which started integration on a modest scale. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) also started on a modest scale and has delivered benefits in terms of promoting growth through greater regional market integration, both within ASEAN and in Asia more generally. ASEAN however runs on different principles to the EU (though there are some similariti ...

Low-productivity, subsistence-smallholder agriculture everywhere faces tremendous new challenges, in addition to decades-old constraints. Smallholders are threatened by being bypassed by the rise and dominance of domestic and global value chains (DVCs, GVCs). They are also being threatened by global warming, which is already rewriting the basic parameters of temperature and precipitation on which their entire activities depend. These global forces are much too powerful for any farmi ...

This paper is about the basic principles which should guide fertilizer policy for smallholder agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa It is not about detailed country-specific prescriptions on the “how” of policy. This important task should constitute the substance of detailed country studies. The overarching goal here is to use fertilizer to spearhead and sustain an African Green Revolution (GR). In this paper, fertilizer use is not considered as an end in itself, but as a necessary mean ...

Commodity prices were once again marked by significant volatility in 2017 and 2018. While there are many economic factors to explain this, politics were also present—trade tensions between China and the United States and, more generally, a rise in uncertainties—weighing upon the global macroeconomic outlook and the ‘dynamism of the markets’. Africa, which has countries with strong growth rates, has, however, been able to show solid economic performance, and this trajectory is not li ...

The author is an alumnus of the 2018 Atlantic Dialogues Emerging Leaders program Arable land per capita availability has been steadily decreasing over the last decades, from 0.5 hectare per capita in 1945 to 0.2 hectares per capita in 2016. Worldwide farmers have been, more or less, addressing the intensification challenge by incorporating new technologies, products, and techniques into their farming systems. The intensification challenge also implied a consolidation of the farming ...

“Teach a parrot the terms ‘supply and demand’ and you’ve got an economist.” That parrot can explain to us what is happening with commodity prices (Chart 1, left side). That is, while agricultural and industrial metal prices - particularly copper - plummeted on average by over 10% since June, energy prices - especially oil - have risen nearly 20% since the beginning of the year. Brent's barrel price is now triple what it was in early 2016. Check the latest World Bank Commodities Pric ...

La ville de Kigali, au Rwanda, a accueilli du 5 au 8 septembre 2018 le forum de l’AGRA, devenant ainsi la capitale de l’agriculture africaine pendant ces quatre journées. Délégations gouvernementales, partenaires techniques et financiers, chercheurs, universitaires, investisseurs, producteurs, club de réflexion, entre autres, étaient en conclave pour faire l’état des lieux du secteur et mesurer les progrès accomplis sur la route de la transformation de l’agriculture africaine.  A t ...

Trade integration is a prerequisite for the success of any economic integration project. The factors hindering trade integration therefore constitute a bottleneck to the economic integration project of the countries of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which is an effective means of coping with the substantial expansion of sub-regional food demand. The aim of this paper is to highlight the factors that constrain trade flows and increase the cost of trade in the ...

OCP Policy Center and its partners, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the Center for Technology and Economic Development (CTED) at the New York University are pleased to announce the publication of a Special Issue on "Food Price Volatility and its Consequences" in Oxford Economic Papers. The papers selected in this special issue were first presented in February 2014 at an international conference organized in Rabat in collaboration with the IMF's Research Department and  t ...

« Les asymétries et l’instabilité du marché des matières premières dans les pays en développement : politiques et impacts sur le développement », une problématique d’un intérêt particulier pour ces pays, a fait l’objet d’un séminaire de recherche organisé par la Fondation pour les Etudes et Recherches sur le Développement International (Ferdi), les 24 et 25 juin 2015 à Clermont-Ferrand. Cet évènement a été tenu la veille du workshop co-organisé par la Ferdi et OCP Policy Center le 2 ...