Improving smallholder welfare in the rural sectors of developing countries requires improving access to both input and product markets. Success, however, in developing sustainable and mutually beneficial links between smallholders and agribusiness has been variable. Two recent ACIAR studies...

Vietnam has designated 3.8 million hectares of agricultural land for paddy rice production, reflecting historical and ongoing concerns about food security. However, Vietnam is now the world’s second largest exporter of rice, and it imports vast quantities of livestock feed, some of which could...

A generalisation of previous household models is developed to include production, consumption, storage, labour and land allocation decisions under price, yield, storage and investment risks. Implications drawn from this model include, that consumption can be a hedge against price risk and that...

The advent of globalisation has brought many opportunities in trade, capital and labour flows and in exchange of information and technology. For agricultural producers, globalisation offers the possibility of expanded markets. But integration into the global economy is fraught with challenges,...

Economic theory often provides information on the variables to be included in economic relationships (e.g., demands are functions of prices) and sometimes provides information on the signs and magnitudes of first- and second-order derivatives (e.g., homogeneity and concavity information)....

Recent empirical studies on agricultural productivity growth in African countries have produced mixed results; some find that uptake of new technology (technical progress) is the main source of total factor productivity growth while others point to improved use of existing technology (efficiency...

The possibility of using biomass as a source of energy in reducing the greenhouse-effect imposed by carbon dioxide emission and relieving energy crisis is a matter of great interest, such as bioethanol production. Nevertheless, the cultivation of dedicated energy crops dose meet with some...

This paper argues that recent increases in international food prices worsened poverty incidence in Indonesia, even though many poor farmers benefited. This conclusion is based on the application of a multi-sectoral, multi-household general equilibrium model of the Indonesian economy. The...

Non-farm rural enterprises (NFRE) are increasingly studied because of their role in poverty reduction. However, existing studies of the effects of infrastructure on NFRE may give incorrect inferences because they typically fail to account for spatial effects. Such effects could reflect either...

The wide use of artificial insemination by dairy farmers has facilitated the development of a multi-billion dollar international market in animal genetics. In the major western dairy producing nations, each country has developed a single index to rank bulls, based on the value of traits they are...