FOOD AND AGRICULTURE

Food and Agriculture

Food and Agriculture

Project Title

Monitoring Food and Agricultural Policies

Project Aims

The project is aimed at analyzing or investigating the following questions through the research:

To investigate that whether the current policies are providing incentives to the production, processing, and marketing to key food and agricultural value chains or do they penalize them?

To investigate that whether all people benefit from the current policies. These people include producers, processors, traders and / or consumers.

To understand the changes that are needed in the current policies for the incentive structure in the food and agriculture sector to be more in line with objectives pursued by the government.

To understand the expenditure spent in the public sector that whether they address the key issues faced by the food and agriculture sector.

To investigate that public investment is focusing on key investment needs.

Context / Background to the Project

Countries are increasing their focus on the achievement of agricultural development for sustainable use of natural resources and enhanced food security. For this purpose, governments can use two instruments that can help them to influence the change in the food and agriculture sector. These instruments are policies and public expenditure (Djankov et al. 2006: pp. 19-25).

For the purpose of attaining specific development objectives, governments use policies for changing the rules that are governed by the economy as a whole or a particular economic sector in order to guide and modify the behaviour and decisions of the agents operating in the economy. This can be done either by establishing a legal framework to which economic agents have to abide (e.g. food quality or safety norms, property rights) lest they run the risk of legal prosecution or fines, through institutional reform or by providing incentives or disincentives to certain behaviours via price and trade policies, input and output marketing policies, social policies (income transfers, safety nets, social security schemes) and finance policies (Tsakok 1990: pp. 305).

Public expenditure, on the other hand, can be used to avail goods and services to the food and agriculture sector to support the implementation of government policies and facilitate achievement of development objectives. This expenditure may include the provision of public goods through public investment in infrastructures for example or private benefits such as, subsidies or income transfers (Tsakok 1990: pp. 305). To monitor their actions and ensure that they are consistent and contribute adequately to the development objectives pursued, it is therefore essential for governments to be fully informed on the incentives or disincentives that the packages of policies they implement provide to the economy, and on the consistency, efficacy and adequacy of the way in which they spend their public resources.

Suggested Methodology

The techniques through which the data will be collected are subject interviews and past research studies in the relevant field. It will help us to understand that what past researchers have said about food and agriculture market. Also, interviews will help us to analyze that what should be done to improve the ...