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Book (stand-alone)PRIVATE STANDARDS IN THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPEAN UNION MARKETS FOR FRUIT AND VEGETABLES
Implications for developing countries
2007Also available in:
No results found.Over the past 20 years the number of standards and certification programmes for agricultural production has grown rapidly. Producers who want to export are confronted not only by a plethora of import regulations, but also within import countries by different niche markets for which specific requirements have to be fulfilled. While the adoption of voluntary standards may grant export opportunities to farmers, they can also be considered barriers to entry for those who cannot apply them either because they are too onerous or because of the lack of knowledge about their requirements. In fact, some producers and exporters increasingly regard private standards as non‑tariff barriers to trade. New and more stringent standards are being developed year after year, and there is an urgent need to determine today, and in the future, the extent to which these govern world trade. This report gives an overview of standards and certification programmes relevant for fruit and v egetable producers and exporters in developing countries with a focus on the markets of the United States and the European Union. In addition, it gives an overview of current analytical work on standards and trade, reviews major assistance programmes related to standards and provides recommendations for further research. -
Book (stand-alone)The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) 2004 2004Technical developments that increase productivity and reduce costs mean that the long-term trend in real agricultural commodity prices on international markets is gradually downwards but that trend is dominated by significant short-term variability. Many developing countries, and especially the least developed countries, continue to depend on just a few agricultural commodities for the bulk of their export earnings. For them, commodity price variability has a strong impact on incomes, employment and government revenues, compromising macroeconomic planning and development efforts more generally. However, developing countries are also as a group increasingly reliant on food imports. The least developed countries are already net food importers. In these circumstances, falling international food prices are obviously beneficial but increasing reliance on imported food also means greater exposure to the variability in international food prices and hence food import bills. Developing countrie s need to contend with variability of international commodity prices in their efforts to increase their export earnings or manage their food import bills. At the same time, they must also contend with the market distortions introduced by the import tariffs and export and production subsidies used by both developed and developing countries, and by the market power in many commodity value chains of large transnational companies. The traditional international responses to commodity market instabili ty based on market interventions or compensation schemes are not currently favoured and new approaches are needed. These new approaches, such as marketbased price risk management, are aimed less at preventing price swings than at helping producers and consumers predict and manage better their adverse impacts.
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Book (stand-alone)The effects of global value chain (GVC) participation on the economic growth of the agricultural and food sectors
Background paper for The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) 2020
2020Also available in:
No results found.Trade liberalization has long been advocated as a means to foster growth and welfare. In developing countries, the expansion of global value chain (GVC) participation of agriculture and food sectors could support transformation from a subsistence-oriented and farm-centered system to a commercialized, productive and off-farm centered one. While empirical evidence examining the linkages between GVC participation and economic performance in the agricultural sector has traditionally relied on case studies at the product level, the availability of new aggregate data on trade in value added, now provides an unprecedented opportunity to carry out a global empirical assessment of the linkages. The present paper examines new measures of GVCs participation and positioning from the EORA panel data for the period 1995–2015 (Nenci, 2020) and tests their effects on changes in agriculture value added per worker. The results show that changes in GVC participation are, on average and ceteris paribus, positively associated with changes in agriculture value added per worker, net to time-invariant confounders, whereas mixed results are found on the effects of countries’ positioning along the value chain. In the conclusive remarks, the authors argue that import tariff and non-tariff barriers – including barriers to service trade – should be seen as the first obstacle to increase GVC participation and improve domestic value-added. The presence of signs of heterogeneity by geographical location confirms that general universal recipes do not exist.
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