In Essay 1, I examine the effects of systemic weather shocks on agricultural producers, agricultural lenders, and rural communities in the northern Malawi and the potential benefits of using weather index insurance as a catastrophic risk management tool. To this end, I develop an agent-based model (ABM) of a hypothetical rural community and the model is calibrated to study the northern Malawi area. I simulate the system-wide impacts of catastrophic weather events and how weather index insurance can be used to mitigate adverse impacts of these events. The model generates results that are consistent with the theoretical and empirical findings that have been published to date on the impacts of weather index insurance when used to support agricultural credit. My simulations also generate novel findings regarding the system-wide impacts of catastrophic weather shocks and the potential benefits of index insurance. In particular, I find that if financial institutions purchase index insurance, they will be able to supply significant extra credit only when the area faces a similar or more severe drought that occurs one in fifty years according to the historical record. In Essay 2, I examine the potential benefits of index insurance by answering more detailed questions. The first question addressed is whether financial institutions have economic motivation to supply additional credit to households if they insure their portfolios using weather index insurance. I find that financial institutions can expect higher profits when utilizing indemnities to supply additional credit than when just holding them. The second question addressed is whether insurance can increase financial inclusion of marginal smallholder households. Specifically, I test whether insuring loan portfolios against weather catastrophes can promote reduction of interest rates offered by banks to smallholder farmers. I find that meso-index insurance could promote reduction of the interest rates for the borrower classes that have the lowest credit rating. Lastly, I test whether a counter-cyclical capital requirement can boost the systemic benefits of meso-index insurance. Due to the pressure on credit supply from the capital requirement and the higher interest rates needed to cover insurance premiums, synergies between insurance and counter-cyclic capital requirement policies do not appear to exist. In Essay 3, I estimate oligopolistic power of major U.S. grain companies which might originate from their oligopsonistic positions to farmers. By extending the linear-quadratic model developed by Karp and Perloff (1989, 1993a, 1993b), the market conduct parameter is estimated in the open loop and the feedback equilibria. In the grain-processing sector, firms’ oligopoly power originates from the oligopolistic power exerted by firms over farmers. Thus, unlike the existing literature, an output quantity is expressed with the input (grain) quantity variable under assumption of CRS production technology. Each firm’s share of storage capacity is taken as a proxy of the firm’s input procurement. Although my result reject the hypothesis of perfect collusion, the do not reject the hypotheses of price taking behavior and the existence of a Nash-Cournot equilibrium.

Nowadays, agricultural-food system has been experiencing major changes which are driven mainly by recent developments in consumer preferences and attitudes, technological improvements, food safety issues and related regulations. The advanced agro-food sec

Wracked by poverty, famine, and drought, Africa is typically represented as agriculturally stagnant, backward, and crisis-prone. Living Under Contract, however, highlights the dynamic, changing character of sub-Saharan agrarian systems by focusing on contract farming. A relatively new and increasingly widespread way of organizing peasant agriculture, contract farming promotes production of a wide variety of crops--from flowers to cocoa, from fresh vegetables to rice--under contract to agribusinesses, exporters, and processers. The proliferation of African growers producing under contract is in fact part of broader changes in the global agro-food system. In this examination of agricultural restructuring and its effect upon various African societies, editors Peter Little and Michael Watts bring together anthropologists, economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists to explore the origins, forms, and consequences of contract production in several African countries, particularly Kenya, the Gambia, Zimbabwe, and the Ivory Coast. Documenting how contract production links farmers, agribusiness, and the state, the contributors examine problematic aspects of this method of agrarian reform. Their case studies, based on long-term field work and analysis on the village and household level, chart the complex effects of contract production on the organization of work and the labor process, rural inequality, gender relations, labor markets, local accumulation strategies, and regional development. Living Under Contract reveals that contract farming represents a distinctive form in which African growers are incorporated into national and world markets. Contract production, which has been a central feature of the agricultural landscape in the advanced capitalist states, is an emerging strategy for "capturing peasants" and for confronting the agrarian question in the late twentieth century.

A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.

This book examines Chinese transnationalism as a distinctive domain within the new 'flexible' capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. It is based on new ethnographic research and interweaves anthropology, culture and politics.