Book & Book Chapters

× During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, several major rice exporting countries, grappling with rising economic uncertainties, suspended rice exports to ensure adequate domestic supply. Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Myanmar temporarily halted rice exports, contributing to spikes in rice prices on international markets. By April 2020, rice prices had increased by over 35 percent in Thailand and 20 percent in Viet Nam (important benchmark countries for international rice price monitoring). International rice prices rose an average of 25 percent during March–September 2020 and remained high (on average 36 percent higher in March 2021) compared to pre-COVID-19 levels, despite the loosening of rice export restrictions and quarantine measures in the second half of 2020.

× Climate change projections internationally accepted as being reliable indicate that most countries in the Pacific region will suffer large-scale negative impacts from climate change. These impacts are likely to include elevated air and sea-surface temperatures, increasingly unpredictable rainfall patterns, rising sea levels, and intensification of extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones and El Niño-related droughts. Pacific island countries are particularly vulnerable to such climatic changes, since on average, two-thirds of the region’s population depends on agriculture and fisheries for its livelihood and food security. This is certainly true of at least two of the three countries analyzed under the study on which this report is based, the latter including Fiji, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and Solomon Islands. PNG and Solomon Islands are both vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change since the percentage share of agriculture in total employment is relatively high in both countries (69% in PNG and 68% in Solomon Islands). Similarly, because of their relatively high percentage share of agriculture in the gross domestic product (GDP) (36% in PNG and 39% in Solomon Islands during 2000-2009), the current capacity of both countries for adapting to climate change is limited.

× The commercialization of agricultur has, in many diverse circumstances, led both to an increase in household income and to changes in the way household resources are organized to earn that income, Have these changes meant that food intakes are more nutritions and that health and sanitation conditions are improved? This chapter addresses three central questions: (1) to what extent are increments in income spent on nonfood items, in particular, health-related items; (2) to what extent are increments in income spent on food, and (controlling income) dows the switch to commercial production alter the marginal propensities to spend on food; and (3) to what extent do increments in food expenditures lead to greater calorie intakes, both at the household level and at the individual preschooler level?

× The choice between subsistence food crops, on the one hand, and cash crops, especially nonfood cash crops predominantly meant for exports, on the other hand, is a subject of considerable debate among policy makers as well as development specialists. The debate raises issues not only at the level of farming households but also at the level of national and international policies, including macroeconomic policies such as trade and exchange rate policies. This chapter reviews and focuses on those aspects of principal relevance in the context of an overall agrcultural development strategy and food security.

× One of the most contentious issues in the cash crop/food crop debate revolves around the impact of commercialization of agriculture on the health and nutritional status of women and children/ This chaper examines the effects of commercialization of agriculture on preschoolers' health nad nutritional status. The chapter also assesses the effects on women along the lines of the conceptual ramework described in chapter 2.

× The three chapters in Part III report synthesis is findings from the microlevel IFPRI research in The Gambia, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, and Rwanda, as well as from the other case studies presented in Part V. Any attempt to synthesize and generalize on the basis of the detailed case studies runs the risk of excessively extrapolating from special circumstances and of losing insights gained from these case studies, whose strengths are the detailed~assessments of the commercialization-production-income-consumption-nutrition chain and the important feedbacks from these elements. This chapter, on the first elements of the commercialization chain, is therefore to be seen in the context of the following two chapters, and all the three synthesis chapters together are to be seen in the context of the rich insights from the individual studies discussed later.

× In this chapter, the basic theoretical relationships and definitional issues related to the commercialization of agriculture and described. Simply speaking, cash crops can be defined as crops for sale. The listing of typical agricultural processing enterprises in chapter 9 gives a rough overview of cash crops (also, see von Braun and Kennedy 1986). Yet, commercialization of agriculture as a process and a characteristic of agricultural change is more than whether or not a cash crop is present to a certain extent in a production system. Commercialization of subsistence agriculture and take many different forms.

× Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling resasons. First, concerns and suspicions about adverse effects on the poor of commercialization of subsistence agriculture persist and influence policy of developing countries and of donor agencies. Second, in rural areas of low-income countries, nutritional welfare is determined by many complex factors whose relationships to agricultural commercialization and economic development need to be traced in order to design optimal rural growth policies that benefit the poor.

× In countries where farming and fishing are major productive activities, processing enterprises can have a strategic developmental role. Infrastructural, institutional, and contractural issues arise around them. Whereas consumption and nutrition effects of agricultural commercialiazation linked to specific processing enterprises are traced in some of the detailed studies in Part V (for example, export vegetables, chapter 12; spices plantation, chapter 14; dairy, chapter 15; sugarcane factories, chapter 13 and 16), this chapter gives an overview of the broader experiences, potentials and problems of agricultural processing enterprises.

× Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling reasons. First, concerns and suspicions about adverse effects on the poor of commercialization of subsistence agriculture persist and influence policy of developing countries and of donor agencies. Second, in rural areas of low-income countries, nutritional welfare is determined by many complex factors whose relationships to agricultural commercialization and economic development need to be traced in order to design optimal rural growth policies that benefit the poor. In view of the challenges of rapid urbanization and the chances of commercialization, the question is not if subsistence agriculture should be overcome, but how. Thus, the purpose of this book is to clarify concepts, add comprehensive factual information, and assist policy and program analysts in identifying potentials and risks of promoting commercialization of agriculture for poverty alleviation.

× The distributional benefits of commercialization of agriculture, access to commercialization opportunities, and sharing of commercialization risks are functions of institutional arrangements. Obviously, the indirect food security and nutritional effects are, thereby, partly a function of such institutional arrangements. This chapter explores the relevance to food security of one form of contractual relationship in agriculture: formal contracts between producers and buyers (generally processors or exporters), a production and marketing system known as contract farming. The chapter does not refer to the extensive literature on informal contractual relations, such as sharecropping, or on traditional systems of contract farming, such as the extensive "strange farmer" system in West Africa's groundnut sector. The chapter draws generalizations and conclusion from studies done by the author and by other researchers. The latter include two research networks initiated by the author. One network surveyed the experience with contract farming in several East and Southern African countries (Eastern Africa Economic Review 1989); the second examined the experience in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines (Glover and Lim, forthcoming).

× This case study captures the story of a short-lived, temporarily successful, yet unsustainable commercialization project. Many such commercialization projects have surfaced and disappeared soon after in low-income countries (see chapter 0), and little is known about their effects on people's welfare, including children's nutrition.

× Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition are linked with one another. Policies influence the strength and direction of these linkages and welfare outcomes. Ignoring the linkages may be to the disadvantage of the nutritional welfare of the poor; opportunities to improve the well-being of the poor may be lost. In this concluding chapter, we attempt to draw some generalized lessons from the receding chapters.