Meet the challenges facing the U.S. agricultural market within the global arena! Economists, agricultural scientists, farm leaders, and trade specialists will find the information they need to determine the importance of specific crops and livestock products in international markets in Competition in Agriculture. Analyzing costs, quality, and policy impacts on such products as beef, dairy, pork, poultry, corn, cotton, fruits, peanuts, rice, soybeans, vegetables, and wheat, Competition in Agriculture provides you with an understanding of international markets to help you design strategies that will increase competitiveness and prevent losses. Complete with research findings, tables, graphs, and studies of domestic and foreign economic and trade policies, this book will help you improve your export capabilities and streamline trade costs in order to maximize market presence. This comprehensive book provides you with information from economic analyses that will help you determine the capability of important agricultural commodities to prosper in the growing international market. Competition in Agriculture offers you in-depth information that will assist you in enhancing and improving your status in the global marketplace. This valuable book: discusses the three aspects of competitiveness--economic policies, geography, and history--to help you understand the factors that influence competitive positioning of agricultural products defines competitiveness and examines factors that influence competitiveness, such as advances in technology; input costs; production economies; production quality and enterprise differentiation; promotion; and external factors, such as government policies and macroeconomic variables analyzes the dramatic effects the North American Free Trade Agreement has had on the U.S. and the world market examines how biotechnology affects the quality and quantity of crops and the implications this has on the world market investigates changing market trends that are influenced by new technologies, alternative methods of expanding trade, new economic and agricultural policies of the United States and other countries, and new or modified trade agreements, among others Offering effective approaches for measuring and understanding competitiveness, this knowledgeable reference gives you strategies for maximizing the potential of major crop and livestock products. Competition in Agriculture will help you meet the challenges facing the U.S. agricultural market within the global arena in order to improve the quality of food and maintain and increase export revenues in the United States.

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 “Competitive Agriculture” is culmination of tireless effort for the benediction of students, graduates and faculties in the satire of agriculture and allied sectors. It consists of totally around eighteen units which includes Importance of Agriculture, Agronomy and Agrometeorology, Plant Breeding and Genetics, Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, Agricultural Entomology, Plant Pathology, Agricultural Microbiology, Crop Physiology, Seed Science and Technology, Agricultural Biotechnology, Agricultural Economics, Finance and Agricultural Business, Agricultural Marketing and Intelligence, Agricultural Extension and Rural Sociology, Horticulture, Forestry, Farm Machinery and Renewable energy, Livestock and Poultry rearing. Each unit has different chapters embodied according to the respective course content of ICAR syllabus. This compilation of question bank is highly useful in preparation for Central and State Public Service Commission examinations, Forestry examinations, ARS, ICAR-NET, Post graduate entrance examinations and all other competitive examinations.

American agriculture changed radically between 1820 and 1870. In turning slowly from subsistence to commercial farming, farmers on the average doubled the portion of their production places on the market, and thereby laid the foundations for today's highly productive agricultural industry. But the modern system was by no means inevitable. It evolved slowly through an intricate process in which innovative and imitative entrepreneurs were the key instruments.

The breathtaking number of mergers and joint ventures among agribusiness firms has left independent American farmers facing the power of an increasingly concentrated buying sector. The origin of farmers' concern with such economic concentration dates back to protests against meatpackers and railroads in the late nineteenth century. Jon Lauck examines the dimensions of this problem in the American Midwest in the decades following World War II. He analyzes the nature of competition within meat-packing and grain markets. In addition, he addresses concerns about corporate entry into production agriculture and the potential displacement of a production system defined by independent family farms. Lauck also considers the ability of farmers to organize in order to counter the market power of large-scale agribusiness buyers. He explores the use of farmer cooperatives and other mechanisms which may increase the bargaining power of farmers. The book offers the first serious historical examination of the National Farmers Organization, which fully embraced the bargaining power cause in the postwar period. Lauck finds that independent farmers' attempts at organization have been more successful than previously recognized, but he also shows that their successes have been undermined by the growing concentration and power of agri-business firms, justifying a new approach to antitrust law in agricultural markets.

This book provides different facets of India's agro and food processing industry in both organised and unorganised segments. It brings forth the topical issues having potential to accelerate the pace of growth in its employment, investment and productivity and strive for improving the global competitiveness. Using advanced quantitative techniques, it brings new evidences on inter-sectoral (agriculture-industry-services) employment and production linkages, contractual arrangements through Farmer Producer Companies, and subcontracting in the processed food sector. It also throws light on India's comparative advantage in export of primary and processed food products. With rising per capita income, urbanisation, and changing food habits of people, India is increasingly striving to improve productivity and competitiveness in agriculture and manufacturing. A concerted policy focus to accelerate private investment in food processing, largely viewed as a sunrise industry, is expected to contribute to large scale job creation and external trade not only in the manufacturing but also in the agricultural sector. Keeping this in mind, considerable insights are featured in the book at the industry and firm levels due to a significant bearing of technological, tariffs and non-tariff barriers and labour regulations on their trade intensity, employment and efficiency. Containing perspectives from the top agriculture and industry economists in the country, the book will be very useful to researchers, academicians, trade analysts and policy makers.

Few Americans know much about contemporary farming, which has evolved dramatically over the past few decades. In The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the award-winning geographer and landscape historian John Fraser Hart describes the transformation of farming from the mid-twentieth century, when small family farms were still viable, to the present, when a farm must sell at least $250,000 of farm products each year to provide an acceptable level of living for a family. The increased scale of agriculture has outmoded the Jeffersonian ideal of small, self-sufficient farms. In the past farmers kept a variety of livestock and grew several crops, but modern family farms have become highly specialized in producing a single type of livestock or one or two crops. As farms have become larger and more specialized, their number has declined. Hart contends that modern family farms need to become integrated into tightly orchestrated food-supply chains in order to thrive, and these complex new organizations of large-scale production require managerial skills of the highest order. According to Hart, this trend is not only inevitable, but it is beneficial, because it produces the food American consumers want to buy at prices they can afford. Although Hart provides the statistics and clear analysis such a study requires, his book focuses on interviews with farmers: those who have shifted from mixed crop-and-livestock farming to cash-grain farming in the Midwest agricultural heartland; beef, dairy, chicken, egg, turkey, and hog producers around the periphery of the heartland; and specialty crop producers on the East and West Coasts. These invaluable case studies bring the reader into direct personal contact with the entrepreneurs who are changing American agriculture. Hart believes that modern large-scale farmers have been criticized unfairly, and The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, the result of decades of research, is his attempt to tell their side of the story.

This volume sets out to explore the dialectic relating agriculture, crisis and conflict, and attempts to expand the knowledge on these interactions. Part 1 of the volume (chapters 1-6) discusses thematic issues and methodological approaches to understanding the intersection of agriculture, crisis and conflict. Part 2 (chapters 7-20) provides case studies that take a detailed approach to understanding agricultural contexts facing crisis and conflict, or the role played by agriculture within crisis and conflict. Studies are selected from areas that might be expected to feature in such a volume (the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America) as well as less obvious regions where conflict within agriculture refers not to widespread violence or wars but rather latent or simmering crisis (Central Asia and Europe). Crises stemming from politically-driven violence, natural disasters and climate change are covered, as well as competition over resources.

The sharp fluctuations in food price inflation at a time of great uncertainty about the economic outlook have raised questions about the functioning of the European food supply chain. While the observed changes in food prices in EU Member States can be linked to developments in the global demand and supply for agricultural commodities, inefficiencies in the functioning of the food supply chain, in terms of competition and regulation, may have played an important role as well. In particular, an analysis of the transmission mechanisms linking agricultural commodity prices with producer and consumer prices shows that the shock caused by the upsurge in agricultural commodities and energy prices in the second half of 2007 and the first half of 2008 was absorbed differently across EU Member States. Crosscountry differences in the regulatory framework appear to have contributed to this fragmentation of the European Single Market. Moreover, there are indications of differences in the conditions of competition across Member States. Finally, consolidation is taking place throughout the food supply chain. While such consolidation can lead to efficiency gains, it may also worsen the conditions of competition to the detriment of consumers and businesses. Keywords: Food, regulation, market structure, competition, pricing. -- (provided by publisher).

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the economic and competition policy issues that buyer power creates. Drawing on economic analysis and cases from around the world, it explains why conventional seller side standards and analyses do not provide an adequate framework for responding to the problems that buyer power can create. Based on evidence that abuse of buyer power is a serious problem for the competitive process, the book evaluates the potential for competition law to deal directly with the problems of abuse either through conventional competition law or special rules aimed at abusive conduct. The author also examines controls over buying groups and mergers as potentially more useful responses to risks created by undue buyer power.