Gain new insight on alleviating food insecurity in one of the poorest areas of the world! This book analyzes various facets of economic reforms in South Asia and their implications for attaining food security. It illuminates relevant issues regarding the constraints and challenges in achieving food security, focusing on South Asian countries where a large percentage of the world's poor reside. This timely resource examines possible future courses of action involving trade and new technological advances to improve agriculture-led development in the region. Economic Reforms and Food Security: The Impact of Trade and Technology in South Asia focuses its attention on the economic reforms and experiences of six nations: Bangladesh Bhutan India Nepal Pakistan Sri Lanka Economic Reforms and Food Security: The Impact of Trade and Technology in South Asia includes the most relevant presentations made at the South Asia Regional Conference held in New Delhi in April of 2002. The book features experts who present lively, important debate on such significant issues as: current economic reformshave they really enhanced food security? trade liberalizationcan the WTO and new trade opportunities handle food security concerns? new technological optionshow they contribute to agricultural production and food security the challenges of waterpricing, subsidies, and other issues in irrigation agricultural diversification and market reforms-how they increase food availability interventions in food and nutrition securityshort-term solutions to reduce food insecurity and more! Economic Reforms and Food Security: The Impact of Trade and Technology in South Asia contains numerous tables and figures to demonstrate the current food situation in this area of the world and offers projections of where improvements can be made. Students and faculty of economics or South Asia will find this book extremely useful; it will also benefit development researchers, policymakers, and governmental officials who are searching for answers to poverty and starvation in developing countries. This text shows you how a concerted effort by governments, agencies, organizations, industries, and individualsbacked by adequate resources and changes in policiescan accelerate progress toward achieving sustainable food security for all.

This book brings together unique experiences of India, China and Israel in overcoming economic, social, and natural resource challenges. Through its eleven chapters, the book captures the role of groundbreaking innovations in achieving unprecedented agricultural growth and stabilizing these nations. It provides a future outlook of the new challenges that will confront these countries in 2030 and beyond, related to tackling food and nutrition security, sustainable agricultural growth and adhering to improved food safety standards. This book provides useful insights for exploring technological innovations and policies that can address these future challenges and develop profitable and sustainable agriculture. This volume also highlights valuable lessons that India, China and Israel provide for the rest of the developing world where population is growing fast; natural resources are limited; and it is a challenge to produce enough food, feed and fibre for their populations. Tracing the historical past, this book is an impressive resource for academicians, policymakers, practitioners, agribusiness players, entrepreneurs in understanding the role of innovations in addressing future challenges.

This open access book provides an evidence-based roadmap for revitalising Indian agriculture while ensuring that the growth process is efficient, inclusive, and sustainable, and results in sustained growth of farmers' incomes. The book, instead of looking for global best practices and evaluating them to assess the possibility of replicating these domestically, looks inward at the best practices and experiences within Indian states, to answer questions such as -- how the agricultural growth process can be speeded up and made more inclusive, and financially viable; are there any best practices that can be studied and replicated to bring about faster growth in agriculture; does the prior hypothesis that rapid agricultural growth can alleviate poverty faster, reduce malnutrition, and augment farmers' incomes stand? To answer these questions, the book follows four broad threads -- i) Linkage between agricultural performance, poverty and malnutrition; ii) Analysing the historical growth performance of agricultural sector in selected Indian states; iii) Will higher agricultural GDP necessarily result in higher incomes for farmers; iv) Analysing the current agricultural policy environment to evaluate its efficiency and efficacy, and consolidate all analysis to create a roadmap. These are discussed in 12 chapters, which provide a building block for the concluding chapter that presents a roadmap for revitalising Indian agriculture while ensuring growth in farmers' incomes.

This book brings together unique experiences of India, China and Israel in overcoming economic, social, and natural resource challenges. Through its eleven chapters, the book captures the role of groundbreaking innovations in achieving unprecedented agricultural growth and stabilizing these nations. It provides a future outlook of the new challenges that will confront these countries in 2030 and beyond, related to tackling food and nutrition security, sustainable agricultural growth and adhering to improved food safety standards. This book provides useful insights for exploring technological innovations and policies that can address these future challenges and develop profitable and sustainable agriculture. This volume also highlights valuable lessons that India, China and Israel provide for the rest of the developing world where population is growing fast; natural resources are limited; and it is a challenge to produce enough food, feed and fibre for their populations. Tracing the historical past, this book is an impressive resource for academicians, policymakers, practitioners, agribusiness players, entrepreneurs in understanding the role of innovations in addressing future challenges.

This open access book provides a clear holistic conceptual framework of CISS-F (competitiveness, inclusiveness, sustainability, scalability and access to finance) to analyse the efficiency of value chains of high value agricultural commodities in India. It is based on the understanding that agriculture is an integrated system that connects farming with logistics, processing and marketing. Farmer's welfare being central to any agricultural policy makes it very pertinent to study how a value chain works and can be strengthened further to realize this policy goal. This book adds value to the existing research by studying the value chains end-to-end across a wide spectrum of agricultural commodities with the holistic lens of CISS-F. It is not enough that a value chain is competitive but not inclusive or it is competitive and inclusive but not sustainable. The issue of scalability is very critical to achieve macro gains in terms of greater farmer outreach and sectoral growth. The research undertaken here brings out some very useful insights for policymaking in terms of what needs to be done better to steer the agricultural value chains towards being more competitive, inclusive, sustainable and scalable. The value chain specific research findings help draw very nuanced policy recommendations as well as present a big picture of the future direction of policy making in agriculture.

Pro-poor opportunities are rapidly unfolding in South Asia, spurred by new lifestyles and tastes, stimulated by increasing incomes, spreading urbanisation, and expanding globalisation. Dietary patterns are changing of both the poor and the rich, as well as rural and urban consumers, from staple foodgrains to high-value-commodities such as fruits, vegetables, milk, meat, eggs, and fish. The real challenge is how to grab these opportunities to alleviate poverty and improve quality of life, particularly for smallholders. This book, comprising contributions by experts from various countries, provides a range of information, analysis, and the beginnings of pathways to accelerate agricultural diversification and facilitate inclusiveness of small holders through correcting incentives, evolving institutions, and developing infrastructure.

Economic freedom matters. It improves outcomes by empowering citizens with the freedom to choose. This report, one of a series starting in 2005, once again seeks to measure economic freedom in different Indian states, and to show how this improves economic outcomes. Economic freedom is a concept first used by the Fraser Institute to measure the extent to which governments constrain efficient decision making and distort resource allocation. It has been used in cross-country literature to show that countries with higher levels of freedom have better development indicators. However, attempts to capture economic freedom at the sub-national level of state governments are rare, although very pertinent in a federal country like India. Many areas of economic decision making in India fall under the jurisdiction of state governments, and are listed in the Seventh Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Our pioneering work modifies the Fraser Institute's methodology of measuring economic freedom across countries, creating a new way of measuring economic freedom across Indian states. This enables us to see which states are getting freer or less free, and to demonstrate how economic freedom at the state level impacts economic development.

This volume of comparative essays analyses key lessons from the reform experiences-agricultural and rural-of India and China and provide policy insights for the continuing reform processes in these two countries as well as for other developing and transition economies. The volume provides factual information on initial conditions in agriculture, changes that have occurred over time, and policies in the two countries. It demonstrates how agriculture-led reform and development provides necessary conditions for manufacturing and service sectors to grow and reform along with a reduction in poverty at the same rate of growth. The comparative analyses extends across the areas of: land reforms; human and social development; public investment; agricultural R irrigation and the water sector; domestic agricultural marketing; WTO and agricultural trade liberalization; agricultural and rural diversification; rural non-farm sector; and anti-poverty programs and safety nets.