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The regional books that provided detailed estimates of distortion in developing economies are all country focused. While they include commodity details for their particular country, they are not able to provide an overview for developing countries or high-income countries as a group, or for the world as a whole. This paper seeks to fill this gap. The paper begins by describing the overall project's coverage of 30 major commodities and their importance in regional and global agricultural production and trade. It then summarizes the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents for twelve key covered products, together with their gross subsidy/tax equivalents in constant dollars. The paper then examines seven largely non-traded food staples that are nonetheless important food items for poor people in low-income countries. Even though those commodities are only a small share of global production and exports of farm products, they can be crucial to the food security of large segments of developing country societies. The agricultural distortions database lends itself to placing the policies affecting (or ignoring) those products in a broader perspective. The final part of the paper provides another new perspective on the project's database. It seeks to shed light on how relatively distorted are the various commodity markets from the viewpoint of global trade or welfare restrictiveness. This analysis draws on the theory outlined in the previous chapter, but switches the focus from countries to products.

Agricultural Policy --- Agricultural Sector Economics --- Agricultural Trade --- Agriculture --- Bananas --- Barley --- Beef --- Cash Crops --- Cocoa --- Coffee --- Cotton --- Food Production --- Food Security --- Grains --- Livestock --- Maize --- Poultry --- Price Stability --- Price Volatility --- Rapeseed --- Rice --- Staple Foods --- Sugar --- Trade Policy --- Wheat

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This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policies as they affected agriculture before and after the various reforms, and in several cases fundamental regime changes, of the past half-century. It then summarizes new estimates of the nominal rate of assistance (NRA) and the relative rate of assistance (RRA) to farmers delivered by national farm and nonfarm policies over the past several decades (depending on data availability), and of those policies' impacts on consumer prices of farm products. Both farmer assistance and consumer taxation is negative in periods where there is an anti-agricultural, pro-urban consumer bias in a country's policy regime. The final sections summarize what the author have learned and draw out implications of the findings, including for poverty and inequality and for possible future directions of policies affecting agricultural incentives in this part of Asia.

Agricultural Policy --- Agricultural Sector Economics --- Agricultural Trade --- Agriculture --- Beef --- Cocoa --- Consumers --- Crops --- Developing Countries --- Economic Development --- Exchange Rates --- Expenditures --- Financial Crisis --- Gdp --- Grains --- Industrialization --- International Food Policy Research Institute --- Livestock --- Low-Income Countries --- Maize --- Political Economy --- Rice --- Rural Development --- Skilled Workers --- Staple Foods --- Sugar --- Trade Barriers --- Trade Liberalization --- Trade Policy --- Wheat --- World Development Indicators --- World Trade Organization

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Public transfer programs that allow beneficiaries to choose the transferred good may be more efficient, but the poorest beneficiaries may not participate if the good chosen is too costly. A model shows that program targeting and consumption impacts are tied to selected quality of the provided good. Evidence from a randomized trial in rural India in which groups of beneficiaries choose the variety of rice to be offered as a subsidized loan confirms that choosing lower cost goods self-targets the program towards the poorest beneficiaries. Consumption impacts are biggest for wealthiest households and may be negative for moderately poor households.

Agriculture --- Consumers --- Consumption --- Control Groups --- Cooking --- Corruption --- Credit --- Debt --- Expenditures --- Food Consumption --- Food Security --- Food Subsidies --- Grains --- Inflation --- Interest Rates --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Maize --- Measurement --- Participation Rates --- Poverty --- Poverty Monitoring & analysis --- Poverty Reduction --- Rice --- Social Protections & Assistance --- Social Protections and Labor --- Staple Foods --- Surplus --- Surveys --- Wheat

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This policy note provides an assessment of some of the impacts and proposed policy responses to problems related to the drought, including the rise in food prices. To address immediate needs, the humanitarian response to the drought is being managed by the Government of Kenya and a number of international organizations including the World Food Program (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). Recognizing that response needs are currently recognizing that response needs are currently being addressed, this note focuses on policy changes that can address long term vulnerabilities related to the drought.

Agribusiness & Markets --- Agricultural Policy --- Agriculture --- Cash Transfers --- Climate Change --- Drought Management --- Expenditures --- External Shocks --- Food Security --- Household Income --- Human Capital --- Hunger --- Insurance --- Land Tenure --- Maize --- Poverty Line --- Poverty Reduction --- Poverty Traps --- Price Stability --- Rainy Season --- Rice --- Risk Aversion --- Risk Management --- Rural Development --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Social Insurance --- Social Protections and Labor --- Staple Foods --- Surplus --- Water Resources --- Wheat --- World Food Programme

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The report seeks to analyze what has been learned about how agricultural interventions influence nutrition outcomes in low-and middle-income countries, focusing on the target populations of the millennium development goals-people living on less than a dollar a day. It also sets out to synthesize lessons from past efforts to improve the synergies between agriculture and nutrition outcomes. The report identifies a number of developments in agriculture and nutrition that have transformed the context in which nutrition is affected by agriculture. The relationship between agriculture and human nutrition is far more complex than the relationship between food production and food consumption or the economic relationship between food supply and food demand. Expanding agriculture's purview and capacity to embrace those contributing factors and determinants of nutrition that are traditionally the province of other disciplines or improving agriculture's interface with other, nonagricultural sectors, suggest themselves as possible ways forward. The limitations of production-focused agricultural programs and interventions in delivering improved nutrition impacts have been recognized by some in the agricultural community for decades. In the early 1980s a number of international development agencies undertook programs that sought to orient agricultural production to nutrition-related objectives, and over time a substantial body of literature developed around the analysis of the programs' results.

Agricultural Extension Services --- Agricultural Policy --- Agricultural Productivity --- Agricultural Sector Economics --- Agriculture --- Agriculture & Farming Systems --- Anemia --- Cash Crops --- Child Health --- Drainage --- Food & Beverage Industry --- Food Consumption --- Food Processing --- Food Production --- Food Safety --- Food Security --- Gender --- Grains --- Health, Nutrition and Population --- Human Capital --- Industry --- International Food Policy Research Institute --- Irrigation --- Land Tenure --- Livestock --- Maize --- Malnutrition --- Maternal Health --- Meat --- Minerals --- Nutrition --- Nutrition Programs --- Obesity --- Poverty Reduction --- Private Sector --- Rice --- Rural Development --- Rural Poverty Reduction --- Sanitation --- Social Capital --- Staple Foods --- Weeds