Agricultural mechanization in Africa south of the Sahara — especially for small farms and businesses — requires a new paradigm to meet the needs of the continent’s evolving farming systems. Can Asia, with its recent success in adopting mechanization, offer a model for Africa? An Evolving Paradigm of Agricultural Mechanization Development analyzes the experiences of eight Asian and five African countries. The authors explore crucial government roles in boosting and supporting mechanization, from import policies to promotion policies to public good policies. Potential approaches presented to facilitating mechanization in Africa include prioritizing market-led hiring services, eliminating distortions, and developing appropriate technologies for the African context. The role of agricultural mechanization within overall agricultural and rural transformation strategies in Africa is also discussed. The book’s recommendations and insights should be useful to national policymakers and the development community, who can adapt this knowledge to local contexts and use it as a foundation for further research.

Climate change is expected to bring new challenges and opportunities for the livelihoods of rural communities in Uganda, where more than 80% of the population depends on rain-fed agriculture. The purpose of this review was to analyze national policies on climate change adaptation, agriculture, forests, management of forested and agroforested landscape ecosystems and their goods and services, and the roles of stakeholders in the national arena. Recognizing the role of forest cover in climate change mitigation and adaptation, this review is based on stakeholder engagement and analysis of published literature on the policy, institutional and socioeconomic drivers of forest cover change around Mount Elgon. The bulk of Uganda’s forests are on land under private ownership and deforestation has occurred mainly in such forests. Several national laws and international conventions ratified by Uganda offer a framework under which forests are managed. Management of protected forests is shared between central and local authorities. Several natural resource policies are likely to have significant unintended impacts that may enable or limit the adaptation of stakeholders and ecosystems to climate change. The current climate change policy, which is an overarching document that addresses climate change in Uganda, suggests that policy responses, either sector specific or crosscutting in nature, be harmonized in order to better address the challenges associated with climate change adaptation and mitigation.

This report assesses the performance of agricultural and food policy in India and calculates a set of policy indicators providing a comprehensive picture of agricultural support. These indicators, developed by the OECD, are already used regularly in the analysis of the agriculture and food ...

Norway is performing unevenly across its four agricultural policy objectives. While Norway enjoys a high level of food security and is meeting its aim of maintaining agricultural production across the country, both environmental performance and the efficient creation of value added along the food chain are compromised by support policies linked to production levels.

This report assesses the performance of agricultural and food policy in India and calculates a set of policy indicators providing a comprehensive picture of agricultural support. These indicators, developed by the OECD, are already used regularly in the analysis of the agriculture and food sector in 51 OECD countries and emerging economies and are now available for India for the first time. Government intervention in India is found to provide both negative and positive support to agriculture, with market and trade interventions often depressing prices, while subsidies to fertilisers, water, power and other inputs incentivise their use. This reveals the inherent difficulty in attempting to secure remunerative prices and higher incomes for farmers, while at the same time keeping food prices low for consumers. The report also points to policy-induced pressures on natural resources such as water and soil. Detailed recommendations are offered which, if implemented, have the potential to improve farmers' welfare, reduce environmental damage, alleviate some of the pressure on scarce resources, better prepare the sector for climate change, improve food and nutrition security for the poor, improve domestic market functioning and position India to participate more fully in agro-food global value chains.

This framework presents ten interrelated principles/elements to guide Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Africa (SAMA). Further, it presents the technical issues to be considered under SAMA and the options to be analysed at the country and sub regional levels. The ten key elements required in a framework for SAMA are as follows: The analysis in the framework calls for a specific approach, involving learning from other parts of the world where significant transformation of the agricultural mechanization sector has already occurred within a three-to-four decade time frame, and developing policies and programmes to realize Africa’s aspirations of Zero Hunger by 2025. This approach entails the identification and prioritization of relevant and interrelated elements to help countries develop strategies and practical development plans that create synergies in line with their agricultural transformation plans. Given the unique characteristics of each country and the diverse needs of Africa due to the ecological heterogeneity and the wide range of farm sizes, the framework avoids being prescriptive.

The vast majority of the world's poorest households depend on farming for their livelihoods. During the 1960s and 1970s, most developing countries imposed pro-urban and anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Although progress has been made over the past two decades to reduce those policy biases, many trade- and welfare-reducing price distortions remain between agriculture and other sectors and within the agricultural sector of both rich and poor countries. Comprehensive empirical studies of the disarray in world agricultural markets appeared approximately 20 years ago. Since then, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development had provided estimates each year of market distortions in high-income countries, but there have been no comparable estimates for the world's developing countries. This volume is the third in a series (other volumes cover Africa, Europe's transition economices, and Latin America and the Caribbean) that not only fills that void for recent years but extends the estimates in a consistent and comparable way back in time and provides analytical narratives for scores of countries that shed light on the evolving nature and extent of policy interventions over the past half-century. 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Asia' provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the 12 largest economies of East and South Asia. Together these countries constitute more than 95 percent of the region's population, agricultural output, and overall GDP. Sectoral, trade, and exchange rate policies in the region have changed greatly since the 1950s, and there have been substantial reforms since the 1980s, most notably in China and India. Nonetheless, numerous price distortions in this region remain and others have added in recent years. The new empirical indicators in these country studies provide a strong evidence-based foundation for assessing the successes and failures of the past and for evaluating policy options for the years ahead.