Outlook on Agriculture

While Africa has traditionally been constrained in world markets by low productivity, animal diseases and high standards for animal health and food safety, the growing demand for meat and the emergence of alternative policy mechanisms for facilitating exports could increase Africa's importance as a global supplier of livestock products. This paper outlines Africa's current role in global meat markets and highlights constraints and opportunities. A key constraint that militates against large-scale exports from Africa is its lack of competitiveness vis-à-vis competitors such as Brazil and India. Africa will need to invest in market development, productivity measures, feed resources and infrastructure to reduce production costs and facilitate effective marketing efforts.

The Barcelona Agreement, which aims to establish a free trade zone between most Mediterranean countries and the EU, was seen as an opportunity for the former to gain easier access to and increase their share of the European fruit and vegetable market. Mediterranean countries are traditional growers of fruit and vegetables, but are struggling to remain competitive in the global market. This paper reports on the current situation and on future prospects for production and trade in fruit and vegetables in the Mediterranean, emphasizing the challenges these countries need to tackle to increase their competitiveness.

This paper develops an economic rationalization of the ‘shift from government to governance’ by employing the logic of the property rights theory of the firm. Rural governance is defined as being based on the equal assignment of property rights and is hypothesized as being preferred by rural stakeholders in those cases where the stakeholders' interests are significantly common. This theoretical argument has been confirmed by an empirical analysis of rural governance in Ukraine through a survey of members of various rural cooperatives in the Kiev region.

With the rapid increase in demand for agricultural products for food, feed and fuel, concerns are growing about sustainability issues. Can agricultural production meet the needs of increasing numbers of people consuming more animal products and using a larger share of crops as fuel for transport, electricity and heat, while still sustaining the natural resource base? In addition to economic models and learning from statistics and trends, there is a perceived need for decision support tools at global, field and plant levels and for the certification of best practices based on crop production ecology (CPE). This paper illustrates the need for and availability of a generic approach to sustainability principles, criteria, indicators and norms to ensure maximum efficiency in the use of resources such as land, water, chemicals and energy in crop biomass production at various levels of scale. The authors propose a method based on a transportable CPE approach, covering ranges of commodities and environments, to address choices in agricultural production: which crop to promote where, how it should be grown to optimize the efficient use of resources, how to certify the best practices and which crop properties need genetic improvement to make the best use of scarce resources in adverse conditions.

Barriers to trade can be imposed if a threat of importing a disease exists. Sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures have historically been applied on a national basis, even though regions in an exporting country may have very different disease profiles. The World Trade Organization's 1995 Agreement on SPS Measures included a provision for exports from disease-free subnational areas. Regionalization has been explored in depth by many countries from a scientific disease control perspective, but not from an economic perspective, and negotiations have been exclusively science-focused. As yet, little progress has been made towards correcting this provision. This article examines the question of creating a sustainable subnational disease-free area approved for export from an economic perspective. The analysis shows that there may be significant benefits from applying regionalization to international trade, but these benefits are not guaranteed. Recognition of economic incentives provides the key to creating sustainable disease-free subnational regions. In particular, removing the incentive to smuggle between regions is an essential requirement of an exporter's domestic policy. Economic incentives have largely been ignored both by the responsible domestic agencies and by international negotiators, but until the question of economic incentives is included in the international agenda, little progress can be expected.

Extension activities are being pulled in many directions, and are being called on to respond more effectively to the needs of farmers to produce and to forge links with markets. In the USA, for example, State Cooperative Extension Services have a variety of purposes in urban areas and operate in cooperation with other government agencies. Thus extension services, while concentrating on production agriculture, especially via privatized and private extension-type service companies, are simultaneously broadening out to include new purposes and a new clientele. While extension's role is straightforward in contract farming and other commercial ventures, such is not necessarily the case with public sector extension. Its structure, organization and operating system may differ from country to country, even from region to region. Nonetheless, whether in the private or public sector, a major concern for extension is to operate in the context of agricultural innovation systems (AIS) so that new knowledge is applied and used. A key objective in reforming extension, as argued in this paper, is to make it a better instrument, or engine, for the promotion of innovation, the dissemination of knowledge and the facilitation of development.

The potential of keeping livestock as a poverty reduction strategy cannot be fully exploited in rural Africa because of the low levels of market participation that characterize mixed and grassland-based farming systems dominating much of Africa. In a set of three former British colonies (Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya), an analysis was conducted to assess differences in institutional development, policy incentives and levels of livestock market participation. Livestock market participation has historically been higher in Kenya and Tanzania than in Uganda. National documents and official reports were subjected to qualitative content analysis. The findings suggest that Kenya has developed an institutional environment that is more conducive to the market participation of traditional cattle keepers than Tanzania and Uganda. The insights obtained from this study are important in redirecting governments, donors and multilateral development agencies from predominantly input-driven livestock development interventions to increased emphasis on institutional and policy support.

A rainfed agroecosystem occupies 68% of India's cultivated area and supports 40% of the human and 65% of the livestock population. Dairy production is an important component of rural development programmes in rainfed areas to improve the livelihoods of farmers. The objective of the study was to characterize the status of smallholder dairy production systems in rainfed areas to generate information that would assist in designing strategies for dairy development programmes. These objectives were achieved by adopting a participatory system approach, which uses diagnostic survey and techniques of participatory rural appraisal. The dairy production systems in rainfed areas are complex and are generally based on traditional and socioeconomic considerations, guided largely by the available feed resources. A scarcity of feed and fodder resources (both quantity and quality), the low production potential of animals, the non-availability of critical inputs or services in time, along with access to capital and markets, were the primary reasons for the low productivity of dairy animals. The study suggests that farmer participation is essential for developing and promoting technical interventions. A favourable policy environment in terms of access to microcredit, assured market and veterinary services will have to be provided, and socioeconomic and technical constraints need to be addressed. Animal health camps and on-farm trials need to be conducted to create awareness among farmers about better dairy production practices.