Explore the vast range of titles available.

South Asia is home to approximately 1.3 billion people, of whom 70 percent live in rural areas. Therefore, agriculture plays a crucial role in the region’s economy, accounting for close to 28 percent of GDP. But poverty is one of the major issues in South Asia, with 40 percent of the world’s poor (defined as those living on less than $1 a day). The further opening of international markets to agricultural exports from South Asia promises to raise the standard of living in this region. The inclusion of agriculture under the rules of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/World Trade Organization (WTO) is considered one of the main achievements of the Uruguay Round, which in 1986 established the WTO, the successor to the GATT. The Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) established a rules-based system of agricultural trade and set guidelines to reduce protection and distortional policies in agricultural trade. However, developing countries did not gain as much as expected under the AoA, so it is imperative that they seize the opportunity to actively and effectively participate in future trade negotiations. Agriculture, Trade, and the WTO in South Asia is a compilation of studies presented at a World Bank-sponsored regional conference in New Delhi, India, in 1999. The studies have been revised and updated, and provide valuable insights into various issues, perspectives, and interests of South Asia in future WTO trade rounds. The book is intended for policymakers, analysts, and other stakeholders from industrialized and developing countries.

PurposeThis research examines the impact of lockdown stringency measures and COVID-19 cases on food and healthcare prices in six Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Turkey (BRICST) countries. This research is conducted in these countries since previous studies failed to examine the effect of COVID-19 reported cases on food and healthcare prices.Design/methodology/approachTo achieve the objectives of this study, food and healthcare services were regressed against CVC and lockdown stringency measures using the dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (DARDL) model. For this purpose, we used daily data for BRICST countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Turkey.FindingsThe empirical evidence indicates that, in the long run, COVID-19 cases significantly and positively affect both food and healthcare prices in India, South Africa and China. In contrast, in the short run, COVID-19 positively affects food and healthcare prices in all countries except Russia and Turkey. Similarly, in the long run, the government stringency index (GSI) and Containment and Health Index (CHI) significantly affect health prices in India and South Africa. In contrast, GSI and CHI significantly affect healthcare prices in South Africa only in the short run. Finally, GSI and CHI significantly affect the food prices in the long run in India, South Africa and China and in the short run in South Africa only.Originality/valueThe widespread impact of the new Coronavirus (COVID-19) has made the world panic. COVID-19 affected all spheres of life, including food supplies and healthcare services. However, most of the empirical research failed to examine the impact of COVID-19 cases on food and healthcare prices which is the main focus of this study. Moreover, in the given context, the authors use a recently developed model that the previous studies failed to use.

This publication explores the meaning of agriculture and guides the reader into new territory, where food, ecology, and culture converge. In the food systems of South Asia, the margin between cultivated and uncultivated biodiversity dissolves through women's day-to-day practice of collecting and cooking food, constituting a feminine landscape. The authors bring this practice to light, and demonstrate the value of food production and consumption systems that are localized rather than globalized. Based on extensive field research in India and Bangladesh, with and by farming communities, the book offers both people-based and evidence-based perspectives on the value of ecological farming, the survival strategies of the very poor, and the ongoing contribution of biodiversity to livelihoods. It also introduces new concepts such as \"the social landscape\" and \"the ethical relations underlying production systems\" relevant to key debates concerning the cultural politics of food sovereignty, land tenure, and the economics of food systems. The authors are leading activists and accomplished researchers with a long history of engagement with farming communities and the peasant world in South Asia and elsewhere. The print edition of this publication includes a DVD entitled Diversity and Food Sovereignty, which presents three farmer-made films. Their message is loud and clear: food sovereignty means the conservation of biological diversity and revitalization of ethical community relations.

Developing Countries, Agriculture and the WTO explores the key issues and options in agricultural trade liberalization from a developing country perspective. The handbook is of particular interest for both developed and developing countries. Chapters cover market access, domestic support, export competition, quota administration methods, food security, biotechnology, intellectual property rights, agricultural trade under the URAA, and many other subjects, always focusing on the question of how the outcome of the WTO negotiations can be made pro-development. Readers are assumed to have at least a basic knowledge of agricultural trade, although many may also be experts in their own areas. Material is covered in summary and in comprehensive detail with supporting data tables, text boxes, figures, and a detailed table of contents. Many chapters have a substantial bibliography, listings of online resources, and tables summarizing the major points of WTO member country proposals that deal directly with each chapter topic.

Seafood was the first class of foods to fall under the 2002 US regulatory requirements for mandatory country-of-origin labelling (COOL). If this regulation created benefits for consumers, filling an information void by demanding information that the market did not, then there should have been an observable response in the demand for seafood. To gauge the impact, we examined markets most likely to respond. We estimated retail demand for shrimp, seafood that in the USA is largely sourced from Southeast Asia and has a history of raising food safety concerns. Our estimated demand systems included standard variables consistent with economic theory—price and expenditure changes, ongoing trends, and seasonality in consumption patterns. The demand systems also accounted for regulations that required country-of-origin labels for some, but not all, foods prior to COOL. Data came from a nationally representative panel of households that record retail food purchases, allowing us to construct relatively high-frequency market data suitable for testing for the presence of even short-lived impacts. Household demographic information allowed us to separately estimate demands by consumers most likely to respond to label information. The demand systems yielded reasonable price and expenditure elasticity estimates, but none of the variables related to COOL revealed evidence of an impact.

A comparative study which describes and analyses the contribution of agriculture to the economies of East Asia. Until now, little attention has been paid to the agricultural sector which actually underpins industrial and commercial development. Recently, this sector has become the focus of increasingly bitter economic disputes, especially over protection and the use of import tariffs. A comparative framework is used, employing case studies from Japan, Taiwan and South Korea to highlight both the common characteristics of agriculture's role in East Asian development, and features particular to the political economy of agriculture in each country.

Slow growth of agricultural income has contributed to poor economic growth and poverty in India in modern times. The condition was weakened by Green Revolutions in the last third of the twentieth century. Conventional accounts attribute the stagnation to institutions created during colonial rule in India. This article suggests, instead, that it derived from an environmental constraint. The Green Revolutions succeeded partly because state aid enabled peasants to overcome the constraint in some regions.