Other Agriculture Study

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  • Publication
    Closing the Potential-Performance Divide in Ugandan Agriculture
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-06-19) World Bank Group
    Agriculture accounts for 70 percent of employment, overwhelmingly on small farms; occupies half of all land area, and provides half of all exports and one-quarter of GDP in Uganda. It is considered a leading sector for future economic growth and economic inclusion in the current National Development Plan. Yet despite having very favorable natural resource and climate conditions for production of a wide variety of crops and livestock, average Total Factor Productivity (TFP) growth--the difference between aggregate output growth and the growth of all inputs and factors of production that produced it--in Ugandan agriculture has been negative for the last two decades. This suggests that on balance the country is now getting less for equal or greater effort. While drought and pest issues likely have played a harmful role, other plausible explanations are a combination of the following: weakening over time of the public institutional base for promoting agricultural productivity at the level of small farms, inefficiencies in agricultural public expenditures, inadequate agricultural regulation and policies, and a lack of collateralizable farm assets. National agricultural output has grown at only 2 percent per annum over the last five years, compared to agricultural output growth of 3 to 5 percent in other EAC members and 3.3 percent per annum growth in Uganda's population over the same period.
  • Publication
    Bangladesh: Agriculture Insurance Situation Analysis
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018) World Bank Group
    Agriculture is key in Bangladesh but highly exposed to risks.The Government provides significant support to agriculture, but currently provides limited support to the development of agriculture insurance.While the Government and external donors spend large amounts of money in the aftermath of disasters – average annual costs of disasters are USD 300 million - the funding gap is still high and can reach more than USD 1.5 billion in bad years.In spite of Government’s efforts, credit to agriculture is still constrained and represents 3 percent of total lending.If agriculture insurance programs were to be developed in Bangladesh, the overall legal, regulatory and supervisory insurance environment would require strengthening.Based on this preliminary assessment and discussions with key stakeholders, the WBG will prepare a technical report and policy briefing for Bangladesh Ministry of Finance’s Bank and Financial Institutions Division (BFID) on four potential types of agricultural insurance programs which have been identified through this situational analysis as priority solutions for further investigation. The four priority areas identified for further investigation are: (1) Livestock insurance for commercial dairy farmers and poultry farmers; (2) Insurance cover for shrimp producers and artisanal fishermen; (3) Crop insurance linked to credit for small and marginal cereal farmers; and (4) Fully subsidized flood-index insurance for the most vulnerable rural households. The diagnostic reports will also analyze potential institutional frameworks that could be considered for agricultural insurance in Bangladesh, paying specific attention to the potential roles for the Government and insurers.
  • Publication
    Developing Parametric Insurance for Weather Related Risks for Indonesia
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-01) World Bank Group
    Indonesia is one of the main agriculture producers globally and largely relies on domestic staples for its growing population. Projections of climate change models for Indonesia point towards increasing temperatures and more extreme distributions of precipitation with more frequent dry and wet periods. The Government of Indonesia (GoI) has been focusing on modernizing rice production through improved irrigation infrastructure and early warning systems to better cope with developing droughts and support schemes for rice farmers. While governments use risk transfer solutions mostly for infrastructure, parametric insurance covers have become increasingly available for agriculture assets including crops, livestock, and forestry. This study investigates the development of a parametric insurance product as an ex ante risk management instrument that relies on regional drought indices and provides province-level payouts to the GoI in case of severe droughts. As a case study, the province of Central Java has been chosen given its importance in rice production and a recent request of the Central Java Government to transfer drought risk. This study uses over 50 years of historical gridded precipitation and temperature data to develop standard precipitation indices (SPI) and standard precipitation evapotranspiration indices (SPEI) to quantify drought extents at a resolution of 50 x 50 km. Preliminary results of this study have been shown and discussed with the Ministry of Agriculture of Central Java, the National Weather Service of Indonesia (BMKG), the Office of the Insurance Regulator, the Ministry of Finance, and leading Indonesian insurers in the form of workshops undertaken in Indonesia (Semarang and Jakarta) in July 2017. The availability of longer seasonal rice production data will improve the validation of the developed indices.
  • Publication
    Dynamics of Rural Growth in Bangladesh: Sustaining Poverty Reduction
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-05-17) World Bank Group
    The rural economy in Bangladesh has been a powerful source of economic growth and has substantially reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural Bangladesh are an underexplored, underappreciated, and largely untold story. The analysis identifies the key changes occurring in the rural economy, the principal drivers of rural incomes, the implications for policy, and related actions to foster future growth, further reduce poverty, and improve food security and nutrition. A substantial strength of this study is its empirical foundation, consisting of three sets of detailed data on rural households. Two of the datasets are unique in tracking the same set of households for more than two decades. These data make it possible to examine how change is occurring within and among rural households; they shed considerable light on trends that tend to be obscured at more aggregate levels of analysis. Nationally representative surveys and aggregate secondary data provide complementary and contextually rich insights into the household data.
  • Publication
    Transforming Vietnamese Agriculture: Gaining More for Less
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-04) World Bank Group
    Over the past quarter century, Vietnam’s agricultural sector has made enormous progress. Vietnam’s performance in terms of agricultural yields, output, and exports, however, has been more impressive than its gains in efficiency, farmer welfare, and product quality. Vietnamese agriculture now sits at a turning point. The agricultural sector now faces growing domestic competition - from cities, industry, and services - for labor, land, and water. Rising labor costs are beginning to inhibit the sector’s ability to compete globally as a low cost producer of bulk undifferentiated commodities. Going forward, Vietnam’s agricultural sector needs to generate more from less. That is, it must generate more economic value - and farmer and consumer welfare - using less natural and human capital and less harmful intermediate inputs. The strategic shift was highlighted in the government’s agricultural restructuring plan (ARP), approved by the Prime Minister in June 2014. The ARP defines sector goals in terms of the triple bottom line of economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable development. It lays out expected changes in the roles and spending patterns of the government in the sector and discusses the need to work with other stakeholders, including in the private sector. It calls for an ambitious and ongoing process of learning and experimentation, and several potential directions are offered in this report.
  • Publication
    Republic of India : Accelerating Agricultural Productivity Growth
    (Washington, DC, 2014-05-21) World Bank Group
    In the past 50 years, Indian agriculture has undergone a major transformation, from dependence on food aid to becoming a consistent net food exporter. The gradual reforms in the agricultural sector (following the broader macro-reforms of the early 1990s) spurred some unprecedented innovations and changes in the food sector driven by private investment. These impressive achievements must now be viewed in light of the policy and investment imperatives that lie ahead. Agricultural growth has improved in recent years (averaging about 3.5 percent since 2004-05), but at a long-term trend rate of growth of 3 percent, agriculture has underperformed relative to its potential. The pockets of post-reform dynamism that have emerged evidently have not reached a sufficiently large scale to influence the sector's performance. For the vast population that still derives a living directly or indirectly from agriculture, achieving "faster, more inclusive, and sustainable growth', the objectives at the heart of the Twelfth five year plan, depends critically on simultaneous efforts to improve agriculture's performance and develop new sources of employment for the disproportionately large share of the labor force still on the farm. The scope of this study is broad in the sense that it marshals considerable empirical evidence and analyses to address those issues. Yet the scope is restricted in the sense that the study does not address all of the issues. A wealth of knowledge exists (and continuing analytical work proceeds) on other major strategic issues, water and irrigation management, food grain management, and public expenditures on agriculture, for example, and the findings of this study must be seen in that context. The lack of sufficient quality data, and often the lack of access to such data, also prevents some issues from being explored in greater depth. Finally, some important issues require more focused and dedicated analysis, such as food safety and quality standards, agricultural trade, and food price increases. This relationship between longer-term strategic issues and contemporary concerns, such as water resource management and food prices, are highlighted in this study through the prism of productivity, but they too require further analysis to fully address the underlying issues.
  • Publication
    Agribusiness Indicators: Nigeria
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014) World Bank Group
    The purpose of this Agriculture Business Indicators Study was to isolate the success factors and construct indicators that reflect the performance of the agriculture sector in Nigeria and that benchmark it in terms directly comparable to agriculture sectors in other developing countries. Providing policy makers and public officials with access to this type of empirical information is seen as way to stimulate and inform policy dialogue about what reforms are needed and about how scarce public resources can be most effectively invested. The indicators can be used to identify specifically where this investment can be used to leverage commercialization through value addition, increasing the competitiveness of a country’s agricultural products domestically, regionally, and in international markets. They can also inform decision makers and investors about which policy measures are likely to be the most effective in enhancing food security, reducing poverty, and encouraging sustainable forms of environmental management. To accelerate agricultural development capable of spurring competitiveness of agricultural products in the domestic, regional, and international markets and could enhance food security; poverty reduction and sustainable environmental management. The study entailed a review of existing literature and the use of informal surveys to obtain information from a variety of stakeholders and actors. The focus was on the key success factors that the Agribusiness Indicators (ABI) team determined to be the most critical factors influencing agribusiness development in Sub-Saharan African countries. The Nigeria study was informed by the outcomes of scoping missions which had been conducted in three initial pilot countries: Ghana, Ethiopia and Mozambique.