Policy background; Historical overview of the minimum price program; Performance of the minimum price program in the northeas; Factors influencing program participation.

Whenever the Bank identifies shortcomings in institutional capability, technical assistance is automatically assumed to be the appropriate response. But technical assistance has, and will continue to have limitations - and there are alternatives.

The prospects for continuous growth in rice yields have been examined within the context of a simulation model where demand parameters for both rural and urban populations and for different income groups have been used. Coupled with available estimates of supply response parameters, the prospects for a rice surplus in year 2000 appear moderate. On average, only 157,000 metric tons of rice surplus would result if current prices were to prevail. If prices were allowed to adjust, only a negligible price decline would result. That is also the case in the more favorable scenario of high growt of rice yields. Domestic demand would be capable of absorbing the increased rice surplus without an appreciable decline in price. The analysis of the proposal to support rice prices through procurement of domestic production has led to the conclusion that even massive increase of domestic procurement would result in very small price increases while at the same time causing serious storage capacity and budgetary problems for the government.

The more concentrated the debt holdings in large money center banks, the higher the secondary price of that debt.

This book describes how Bangladesh transformed its food markets and food policies to free the country from the constant threat of famine. Since 1990, the Bangladeshi government has dismantled its food rationing system, privatized grain distribution, eased restrictions on international trade, and reduced its own presence in grain markets. The foundation for these developments was laid in the preceding decades. Improvements in agricultural science in the 1970s roughly doubled farm yields, while in the 1980s liberalization of irrigation restrictions, the lifting of import barriers to irrigation technology, and the privatization of fertilizer distribution rapidly increased rice cultivation. These increases in production, coupled with improvements in infrastructure and a more slowly growing and increasingly urban population, have substantially changed the structure of food grain markets, leading to increased marketing volumes, lower prices, and significantly larger private grain stocks. The book sets the Bangladeshi case in the larger context of the South Asian subcontinent and other developing countries in Asia. The authors examine the shifting structure of supply and demand in the grain markets, the history of government intervention in those markets, and the more recent changes that altered the arguments for such intervention and led to policy changes. The case of Bangladesh also has more general relevance as a study of the outcomes of a market-oriented reform program.