Between 1970 and 2009, India has overcome many infrastructural, market, and institutional challenges to transition from a dairy importing nation to the top producer in the world of both buffalo and goat milk, as well as the sixth largest producer of cow milk. In India, at least 100 million households are involved in farming and 70 million have dairy cattle. In India, dairy production is important for employment, income levels, and the nutritional quality of diets. Milk production in India is dominated by smallholder farmers including landless agricultural workers. For example, 80 percent of milk comes from farms with only two to five cows. A well-known smallholder dairy production initiative, Operation Flood, laid the foundation for a dairy cooperative movement that presently ensures returns on dairy investments to 13 million members. Operation Flood also advanced infrastructural improvements to enable the procurement, processing, marketing, and production of milk and to link India's major metropolitan cities with dairy cooperatives nationwide. This intervention transformed the policy environment, brought significant technological advancements into the rural milk sector, established many village cooperatives, and oriented the dairy industry toward markets.

Debates about public expenditure in the agricultural sector have reopened in many developing and emerging economies because of high budget deficits and changes in public opinion. As a result, agricultural policy in many of these countries is beginning to take a more market-oriented approach to agrarian problems, most notably through the introduction of contract farming. This book explores the policy issues around contract farming and its transformative potential and addresses the lack of empirical research on this topic by focusing on South Asia: principally India, Bangladesh and Nepal. The book first addresses the effects of contract farming (vertical coordination) on productivity, food security indicators (yield, consumption expenditures, prices), employment and input usage. Then it draws lessons from the South Asian case studies on the impact of institutional changes, like contract farming, on income and food security of smallholder households. The core of the book includes case study chapters on several commodities that are produced under contract farming, including vegetables and fisheries in Bangladesh, low-value crops in Nepal and coffee in India. Other chapters also explore contracts, storage, input usage and technical efficiency in these cases. This book serves as an essential guide to academics, researchers, students, legislative liaisons and think tank groups interested in agrarian issues, agricultural economics and agricultural policy in emerging economies and particularly in South Asia.

The world has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. While, in 1960, roughly 30 percent of the world's population suffered from hunger and malnutrition, today less than 20 percent doessome five billion people now have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains by increasing food supplies, reducing food prices, and creating new income and employment opportunities for some of the world's poorest people.This book examines where, why, and how past interventions in agricultural development have succeeded. It carefully reviews the policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development that have reduced hunger and poverty across Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past half century. The 19 successes included here are described in in-depth case studies that synthesize the evidence on the intervention's impact on agricultural productivity and food security, evaluate the rigor with which the evidence was collected, and assess the tradeoffs inherent in each success. Together, these chapters provide evidence of "what works" in agricultural development.

This book examines the theory and global evidence on structural transformation along with stylised facts and implications using, among others, a dynamic panel model, for South Asia. The characteristics of the structural transformation process in Bangladesh bring out the relevance of a comprehensive and inclusive South Asian ‘brand’ in view of the challenges of large population size, high burden of poverty, rising inequalities and its compulsion to achieve rapid and sustained inclusive development. The analysis highlights several distinct characteristics of Bangladesh’s structural transformation including changes in value added, trade, employment, productivity, formal-informal jobs, and opportunities for low-skilled workers. The book suggests that the manufacturing sector could not create the required number of jobs and generate rapid absolute and relative productivity gains in the Bangladesh economy. Although the services sector has largely led output and employment growth, services subsectors with strong labour absorptive capacity have low average productivity. Hence, growth-enhancing structural transformation led by these subsectors is likely to be less dynamic than required for rapid employment-creating growth in the economy. The book’s analysis on COVID-19 and cyclone Amphan shows that an integrated disaster and development paradigm is needed for Bangladesh. An inclusive and health and well-being focused structural transformation presents the pathway to advance the people-centred approach to development in Bangladesh through both vulnerability reduction and investments in sustainable development that would offset both known and unknown disaster threats. The key for Bangladesh is to skillfully manage the ‘developer’s dilemma’ of achieving both structural transformation in terms of large productivity gains and inclusive growth for reducing poverty and rising inequalities. This book is relevant to students, academicians and development practitioners and others interested in contemporary development.

From 2006 to mid-2008 the international prices of agricultural commodities increased considerably, by a factor larger than two. This upward trend in agricultural prices captured the world's attention as a new food crisis was emerging. Several explanations for these movements in prices, ranging from demand-driven forces to supply shocks, have been provided by analysts, researchers, and development institutions. This paper is an attempt to empirically validate these explanations using time series econometrics and data at monthly frequency. We focus on the international price of corn, wheat, rice, and soybeans. First, we identify variables associated with the factors mentioned as causing the increase in these agricultural commodities prices. Second, we use time series analysis to try to quantitatively validate those explanations. The empirical work presented here includes first difference models and rolling Granger causality tests. Overall, our empirical analysis mainly provides evidence that financial activity in futures markets and proxies for speculation can help explain the observed change in food prices; any other explanation is not well supported by our time series analysis.

The substantial differences in agricultural productivity between Asia and Africa can be largely explained by differences in use of modern inputs. The evidence suggests that better access to infrastructure (such as roads and irrigation) and agricultural services has given Asian farmers significantly better access to modern inputs, while Sub-Saharan African farmers without such an access are not able to fully exploit the benefits of modern agricultural inputs. This brief discusses the relationship between agricultural service provision and modern input use by farmers in Nigeria, with a focus on the differences among states and local government areas (LGA).

This book draws examples from food security issues in Bangladesh. The book is structured around those issues and underlying causes of food security, the implications from different sectors, policy analysis, and the role and actions of various stakeholders from different sectors to ensure food security. Bangladesh is situated in a climatically vulnerable position and is impacted frequently by such climatic hazards as floods, cyclones, droughts, and salinity intrusion. Due to global atmospheric changes, abrupt shifts in climatic conditions severely affect Bangladesh’s agriculture. Although Bangladesh has made significant progress in increasing domestic production of food grain, if the production of major cereals is hampered due to climate change, food security will be in jeopardy. Most estimates show that a huge amount of additional food grain will be required to feed the growing population of the country. Ensuring food security for all is the overarching goal of Bangladesh’s national food policy. Therefore, ensuring food security in the future requires a great deal of additional effort in yield improvement, with limited scope for expanding the area under cultivation. The primary target readers for this book are students and researchers in the fields of environment, disaster risk reduction, and climate change studies. The book will provide them with a good idea of the current trend of research in the field and will furnish basic knowledge on this important topic. Another target group comprises practitioners and policy makers, who will be able to apply collective knowledge to policy and decision making.