This open access book examines the interactions between India’s economic development, agricultural production, and nutrition through the lens of a “Food Systems Approach (FSA).” The Indian growth story is a paradoxical one. Despite economic progress over the past two decades, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition problems persist. Simultaneously, recent trends in obesity along with micro-nutrient deficiency portend to a future public health crisis. This book explores various challenges and opportunities to achieve a nutrition-secure future through diversified production systems, improved health and hygiene environment and greater individual capability to access a balanced diet contributing to an increase in overall productivity. The authors bring together the latest data and scientific evidence from the country to map out the current state of food systems and nutrition outcomes. They place India within the context of other developing country experiences and highlight India’s status as an outlier in terms of the persistence of high levels of stunting while following global trends in obesity. This book discusses the policy and institutional interventions needed for promoting a nutrition-sensitive food system and the multi-sectoral strategies needed for simultaneously addressing the triple burden of malnutrition in India.

This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Volume Five highlights new advances in the field, with this new release exploring comprehensive chapters written by an international board of authors who discuss topics such as The Economics of Agricultural Innovation, Climate, food and agriculture, Agricultural Labor Markets: Immigration Policy, Minimum Wages, Etc., Risk Management in Agricultural Production, Animal Health and Livestock Disease, Behavioral and Experimental Economics to Inform Agri-Environmental Programs and Policies, Big Data, Machine Learning Methods for Agricultural and Applied Economists, Agricultural data collection to minimize measurement error and maximize coverage, Gender, agriculture and nutrition, Social Networks Analysis In Agricultural Economics, and more. - Presents the latest release in the Handbook of Agricultural Economics - Written and contributed by leaders in the field - Covers topics such as The Economics of Agricultural Innovation, Climate, Food and Agriculture, Agricultural Labor Markets, and more

Twenty years ago, Fair Trade started as an effort to enable smallholder producers from developing countries to successfully compete in international markets. Better access to market outlets and stable prices are considered key principles for sustainable poverty reduction and stakeholder participation based on 'trade, not aid'. While Fair Trade is primarily conceived as a trading partnership - based on dialogue, transparency and mutual respect - seeking greater equity in international trade, it relies on an organized social movement promoting standards for production practices and delivery procedures, working conditions and labour remuneration, environmental care and social policies in supply chains of certified tropical goods. Over the past two decades, sales of Fair Trade products have considerably increased. After the first shipments of coffee, the range of products has gradually broadened to include fruit (particularly bananas, pineapple and citrus), tea, cocoa, textiles, cosmetics and a whole series of other products. Global Fair Trade sales have steadily grown to approximately EUR 1.6 billion worldwide, covering almost 600 producer organizations in more than 55 developing countries that represent close to a million families of farmers and workers. In recent years, efforts have been made towards mainstreaming of Fair Trade involving large international companies and retail chains. While numerous case studies and descriptive overviews are available to illustrate the importance of Fair Trade for producers and their families in developing countries, little quantitative evidence has been presented to review the socio-economic impact of Fair Trade. This collection of articles provides the first balanced in-depth analysis of the real welfare impact of Fair Trade, paying attention to key dimensions of income, consumption, wealth, environment, empowerment and gender. The core articles are based on extensive field surveys in Peru, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ghana, Kenya and Mexico, and provide valuable insights in the contributions and constraints for producers’ involvement in Fair Trade. In addition, attention is paid to the broader implications for international trade regimes and the ethical perspectives on Fair Trade.

Agricultural Marketing examines the principles and practices of economic analysis to cultivate an understanding of how agricultural and food markets operate. After an introduction that discusses some of the most frequently encountered economic measurements of market status, a basic framework is presented for the analysis of economic activities that link agricultural production with food consumption. Coverage then explores both the spatial and temporal dimensions of agricultural markets. For those interested in international agricultural and food marketing, economics, and production.

The food industry is a notoriously complex economic sector that has not received the attention it deserves within legal scholarship. Production and distribution of food is complex because of its polycentric character (as it operates at the intersection of different public policies) and its dynamic evolution and transformation in the last few decades (from technological and governance perspectives). This volume introduces the global value chain approach as a useful way to analyse competition law and applies it to the operations of food chains and the challenges of their regulation. Together, the chapters not only provide a comprehensive mapping of a vast comparative field, but also shed light on the intricacies of the various policies and legal fields in operation. The book offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for competition authorities, companies and academics, and fills a massive gap in the competition policy literature dealing with global value chains and food.

This book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far. The model assumes that households are price-takers and is therefore recursive. The decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor. Comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies. The empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive. The book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households, marketed surplus, the demand for nonagricultural goods and services, the rural labor market, budget revenues, and foreign exchange earnings. In addition, it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition, nutritional status, health, saving, and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings. Methodological topics, primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions, along with aggregation, market interaction, uncertainty, and market imperfections are discussed. The most important methodological issues - the question of the recursive property of these models - is also discussed.