Thumbnail Image

Rice prices and growth, and poverty reduction in Bangladesh

Year of publication 2018

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 45 p.

Author Khan Ahmed Sayeed Murshid and Muhammad Yunus

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Book (stand-alone)

ISBN 978-92-5-130107-4

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) This paper examines the complex relationship between rice prices and economic growth, poverty reduction, and food security in Bangladesh including the impact on producers and consumers. The impact on macro variables is also examined. Using available literature and knowledge of Bangladesh, the researchers examine whether or not a relationship between economic growth/poverty reduction in Bangladesh and rice prices likely exists, and also discusses the mechanisms through which the two are potentially related. The paper finds that historically, the rice sector used to dominate Bangladesh agriculture and the economy as a whole, determining GDP growth rates, inflation, wages, employment, food security and poverty with the rice price being a very sensitive economic and political economy variable. This has changed dramatically with a much more diversified agricultural economy, declining share of agriculture and rice in GDP and rapid industrialization and growth of services. The rice sector (production) has benefited immensely from the Green Revolution, tripling production in three decades and continuing to play a significant role in employment creation and food security. It also benefited from the trade liberalization and structural adjustment reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that served to open up agriculture to world market forces while also reducing subsidies and withdrawing from a number of direct interventions. The startling fact is that the performance of the sector was accompanied by a long–term decline in real rice prices. It is unlikely that this kind of performance is sustainable in the absence of any further technological, cost–reducing breakthroughs so that policy makers need to focus on how to deliver price and non–price incentives to this important sector.

Language English

Also available in:
No results found.

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Thumbnail Image
    Document
    The 2007-08 Rice Price Crisis
    How policies drove up prices... and how they can help stabilise the market
    2011
    Also available in:
    After increasing slowly and steadily from historic lows, world rice prices tripled in just six months during 2007-08. The price surge caused much anxiety because so many of the world’s poor are rice consumers. And it caught many by surprise as market fundamentals were sound. Indeed, it was government policies, rather than changes in the production and consumption of rice, that drove the surge. This suggests that improved government policies can help avert such crises in the future.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Document
    Rice International Commodity Profile 2006
    Also available in:
    No results found.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Book (stand-alone)
    Rural Asia-Pacific: inter-disciplinary strategies to combat hunger and poverty. Rice-based livelihood-support systems. 2002
    Also available in:
    No results found.
    The document describes new inter-disciplinary strategies for agricultural and rural development in Asia and the Pacific, which have been developed by the FAO regional office. It identifies sustainable strategies to make Asia’s rice-centred farmlands yield more food, incomes and livelihoods for the region’s over 3 billion people towards realising the vision of eradicating hunger and rural poverty in the Asia-Pacific rice lands over the next three decades. The publication examines the potential of the wide range of rice-based farming systems in the region to meet the food and livelihood security demands that will be made on them in the coming decades. It outlines a menu of inter-disciplinary strategies and interventions to enable the rice-based systems to live up to the challenge and the role that FAO can play in this.
Show more

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

No results found.