Enabling Environment

In January 2012, the Enabling Agricultral Trade (EAT) Project published two new AgBEE Snapshots outlining the business enabling environment for agriculture in the Jordanian and Palestinian economies. These documents provide an overview of the impediments to agribusiness expansion and profit in each economy, leading to recommendations for further research along five crucial areas in the lifecycle of a successful agribusiness operation – accessing inputs, accessing finance, operating a business, linking to markets, and competing fairly are identified.

For example, in Jordan, poor water management, coupled with distorted incentives for smallholders and exacerbated by inconsistent government policies, is one of the core policy issues preventing the sector from reaching full potential. In the Palestinian Economy, agribusinesses are severely limited by national and regional policies that obstruct their access to land, water, agricultural inputs, and markets.

This publication was produced by USAID’s Enabling Agricultural Trade (EAT) Project, implemented by Fintrac Inc.

The USAID Resilience Workshop was held on December 13-14, 2011. Download the full agenda at right, or read about the workshop on the Agrilinks Blog or the USAID Impact Blog.

Click here for a summary of all available resources.

This event was jointly hosted by the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, Bureau for Food Security, and Bureau for Africa In partnership with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the USAID/Office of Food for Peace-funded TOPS Program in support of the Feed the Future Initiative.

OBJECTIVES

• Foster a common understanding of what is meant by resilience and resilience programming;
• Identify successful strategies and enabling conditions to build resilience, as well as lessons learned from less successful strategies;
• Demonstrate the value of resilience programming in mitigating the effect of shocks and recovery from them, and its potential role in any “pathway out of poverty;” and
• Identify the linkages between resilience and economic growth.

This presentation by Andrew Keck (IRG), was part of the Ag Sector Council Meeting, "The Senegal Local Support Fund: Capacity Building for a Competitive Maize Value Chain." The seminar was held at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, D.C. on July 20, 2011.

"Achieving Scale in Agriculture: Past Efforts, Present Promise"

Discussion Paper by Randy Chester, USAID

Published in 2005

Resource document for the Sustainable Intensification Panel on Day 4 of the December 2011 Agriculture Core Course

"USAID Agriculture Strategy: Linking Producers to Markets"

General resource document from USAID

"Agriculture: A Holistic Approach"

Presentation by Steven Haggblade, Michigan State University, on Day 1 of the December 2011 Agriculture Core Course

References:

STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION

Peter Timmer. 1988.
The Agricultural Transformation.
Chapter 8 in Chenery and Srinivasan, editors, Handbook of Development Economics Volume 1. Amsterdam: North Holland Press.

Peter Hazell, Steven Haggblade and Thomas Reardon. 2007.
Structural Transformation and the Rural Nonfarm Economy.
Chapter 4 in Haggblade, Hazell and Reardon, editors, Transforming the Rural Nonfarm Economy: Opportunities and Threats in the Developing World. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

POVERTY TRAPS

Carter, Michael and Barrett, Christopher. 2006.
The Economics of Poverty Traps and Persistent Poverty: An Asset-Based Approach.
Journal of Development Studies 42(2):178-199.

Christopher Barrett. 2002.
Poverty Traps and Resource Degradation.
BASIS Brief No. 6. http://www.basis.wisc.edu/basis_crsp/live/basbrief06.pdf

SMALLHOLDER COMMERCIALIZATION

Jayne, T.S., Mather, D., and Mghenyi, E. 2010.
Principal Challenges Confronting Smallholder Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa.
World Development 38(10):1384-1398.

CALL OPTIONS ON THE SAFEX EXCHANGE (PRICE RISK HEDGING)

Julie Dana. 2007.
Malawi's Experience with SAFEX-based Market Solutions for Food Security.
UNCTAD 3 September 2007. http://www.unctad.org/sections/wcmu/docs/c1em33p19_en.pdf

David Rohrbach. 2010.
Commodity Price Hedging and Supply/Price Stabilization in Malawi.
African Agricultural Markets Program. "Agricultural Risks Management in Africa: Taking Stock of What Has and Hasn’t Worked" (Lilongwe, Malawi, September 6-10, 2010) http://www.aec.msu.edu/fs2/aamp/sept_2010/aamp_lilongwe-5-2_rohrbach-call_options.pdf

"Agriculture Enabling Environments"

Presentation by Wade Channell, USAID, on Day 3 of the December Agriculture Core Course.