From 2010 through 2012 harvest seasons, Zambian farmers produced three consecutive maize bumper harvests. The total maize production during this period was 8.6 million metric tonness, of which 4.6 million metric tonnes was a marketable surplus (CSO/MAL various years). This far exceeded the...

Nearly three decades after the initiation of agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), subsidies for fertilizer and seed are once again the cornerstone of many SSA governments’ agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies. Zambia is a prime example. In the last...

The degree to which countries are pursuing regional trade agreements (RTAs) has been nothing short of extraordinary. The latest wave of regional integration, however, is “breeding concern” among academics and policymakers as to the extra‐regional effects of these agreements and their...

Recent empirical studies have estimated the trade flow effect of membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). One important, although largely untested, conclusion from this literature is that the GATT/WTO has worked well...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/23/11.

The advancement of South America’s agro-pastoral frontier has been widely linked to losses in biodiversity and tropical forests, with particular impacts on the Brazilian cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the Amazon. Here I consider an important, yet largely overlooked, driver of South...

Most observers agree that the major areas where gains can be made in CETA are in the services sector and selected areas of manufacturing. It seems unlikely that CETA will be as all encompassing as the NAFTA with only a few agricultural products excluded from full tariff elimination. Still, it...

Since the inception of supply management in Canada during the 1970s, milk production quota has been used to regulate output and participation in the dairy industry. In recent years, milk quota values have increased dramatically, almost tripling in value since the mid-1980s. This led to the Dairy...