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Browsing by Author "Reardon, Thomas"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries
    Reardon, Thomas; Barrett, C. B.; Berdegué, J. A.; Swinnen, J. (2009)
    The agrifood industry has undergone dramatic transformation in the last 60 years. There is mixed evidence on the transformation’s impact on small famers in developing countries. This article reviews the literature on these impacts from the 1980’s to present, and introduces a special issue focusing on agrifood industry transformation. It identifies two primary stages of the transformation of the agrifood industry as pre-liberalization/pre-globalization and liberalization/globalization. Various aspects of restructuring of the wholesale, processing, and retail sectors are covered, including: the modernized system of procurement; the switch from public to private standards; the increasingly significant role of credit and determinants for and effects of farmers’ participation in this transformation. It introduces the special issues’ contributions to the understanding of famers’ inclusion/exclusion, the benefits of inclusion, and the role of policy in the industry’s transformation.
  • Issues in the analysis of the effects of policy on conservation and productivity at the household level in developing countries
    Reardon, Thomas; Vosti, S. A. (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: DLG-Verlag, 1992)
    Policy makers in developing countries have a pressing concern in the short-term for their agricultural sectors: large productivity increases to fuel overall growth and alleviate rural poverty. In some zones, especially in low potential zones, degradation poses an immediate threat to output growth. In high potential zones it is also a long-term threat that could undermine short-run productivity increases. The paper distinguishes 'productivity investments' and 'conservation investments'. One does not always promote the other, but both are needed. Productivity investments that might undermine long-term sustainability need to be completed by conservation investments (bunds, terraces, windbreaks, etc.). The most desirable are investments that do both. The household's decision process to choose cropping and conservation investments and land-use practices is conceptualized as being nested in a larger household decision process that proceeds from multisectoral choices, through sectoral choices, through choices of types of investments. It is argued that this is an essential perspective for the examination of policy effects on the environment. Finally, it is contended that macro and sectoral policies determine the profitability of agriculture, and hence the household's will to make investments in agriculture (whether cropping or conservation), but the State needs complementary, specific policies to encourage and enable the household to make complementary soil conservation investments. [CAB Abstracts]
  • Links between rural poverty and the environment in developing countries: Asset categories and investment poverty
    Reardon, Thomas; Vosti, S. A. (Elsevier Science, 1995)
    This paper presents a framework for analyzing the links between poverty and the environment in rural areas of developing countries. It introduces the concept of ''investment poverty'' and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links. The notion of poverty is examined in the context of categories of assets and categories of environment change, with particular focus on farm household income generation and investment strategies as determinants of the links. The strength and direction of the poverty-environment links are shown to differ (even invert) depending on the composition of the assets held by the rural poor and the types of environmental problems they face. Policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect market development, community wealth, infrastructure, household asset distribution, and the affordability and appropriateness of natural resource conservation technologies.
  • Nonfarm income diversification and household livelihood strategies in rural Africa: Concepts, dynamics, and policy implications
    Reardon, Thomas; Barrett, C. B.; Webb, Patrick (Elsevier Science Ltd., 2001)
    Asset, activity, and income diversification lie at the heart of livelihood strategies in rural Africa. This paper introduces a special issue on the topic "Income Diversification and Livelihoods in Rural Africa: Cause and Consequence of Change." We concentrate on core conceptual issues that bedevil the literature on rural income diversification and the policy implications of the empirical evidence presented in this special issue.
  • Sustainability, Growth and Poverty Alleviation: A Policy and Agroecological Perspective
    (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins University Press, 1997)
    The book has four objectives: 1. to examine links among three critical development objectives-agricultural growth, poverty alleviation, and the sustainable use of natural resources in rural areas of the developing world, especially the links between agricultural growth and sustainability and the links between poverty alleviation and sustainability; 2. to examine the nature and determinants of the links by agroecological zone and geopolitical area within major areas (the humid and subhumid tropics, the arid and semi-arid tropics and the tropical highlands); 3. to examine the policies, technologies, institutions and other factors that condition these links; 4. to draw implications for design and implementation of policies, technologies and institutions to make as compatible as possible, and pursue as much as possible, all three objectives. The book focuses on rural households and communities, key actors in natural resource management. It discusses findings on the concept of sustainability, links among sustainability, growth and poverty alleviation, and factors conditioning the links such as policies, technologies and agroclimatic conditions. Conclusions highlight certain key approaches to development strategy and practice. First, agendas of environment and agricultural growth and poverty alleviation are linked: pursuing one without regard to the others is a path of failure in the long run. Second, the links between poverty and environment and between growth and environment are conditioned by complex interactions among policies, technologies, and institutions. This complexity is exacerbated by differences in the links across agroecological zones. There is thus no simple solution such as low-input agriculture or local participation, or even renewals of Green Revolution approaches. Instead, there is a hard path ahead to seek combinations of innovative approaches that will find and promote "overlap technologies" that sustain the resource base while meeting ambitious but necessary growth goals. Finally, the key actors are rural households and communities, who put as top priority today's survival and food security. Solutions that are aimed at helping the environment without helping rural economies to grow and become less poor will, in the end, neither meet environment goals nor be sustainable. - summarized from Introduction
  • Transformation of markets for agricultural output in developing countries since 1950: How has thinking changed?
    Reardon, Thomas; Timmer, C. Peter (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Elsevier Press, 2005)
    This chapter traces the evolution of the agricultural economics literature on agrifood output markets over the past 50 years, emphasizing research approaches and policy issues. The analysis of agrifood systems encompasses the demand and supply side of output markets. The analysis in this chapter is set within the conceptual framework of how the agrifood economy develops during the agricultural and structural transformation. The related paths of development of policy and policy issues, and research themes and methods, are analyzed in parallel. The chapter examines the shift from broad and atomistic "commodity" markets to differentiated and more concentrated "product" markets over the half-century. Spurred by massive retail sector foreign direct investment (FDI) to which was added competitive investments for domestic capital, a profound retail transformation has occurred in the past decade- the "supermarket revolution." This revolution has been the leading edge of globalization of domestic agrifood systems, not, as the literature currently emphasizes, opening to international trade. The chapter ends with a focus on the challenge for researchers in the next several decades, especially the need for new research methodologies that are suitable for understanding the role and influence of a small number of large-scale multinational firms, and for analyzing the impacts of the consolidation of the downstream segments of the agrifood system- the food industry- on upstream segments of the domestic agrifood systems, on rural development, and on trade.