Coping and adaptation against decreasing fish resources : case study of fishermen in Lake Inle, Myanmar

Fishermen depend on Lake Inle in Myanmar for their livelihood. However, the lake has been undergoing environmental degradation over the years. Adding to the long-term decrease in the catch because of this degradation, these fishermen faced extremely low water levels in 2010, which they had previously not experienced. Based on field surveys, this paper aims to reveal how fishermen adapted and coped with the changing environment as well as the sudden shock of the abnormally low water levels.

Food safety control system of Chinese eel exports and its challenges

This paper analyzes factors associated with the rejection of products at ports of importer countries and remedial actions taken by producers in China. As an example, it uses one of the most competitive agro-food products of China: live and processed eels. This paper provides an overview of eel production and trade trends in China. In addition, it identifies the causes of port rejection of Chinese eel products as veterinary drug residues by examining the detailed case studies of export firms and the countermeasures taken by the government and firms.

Response of local producers to agro-food port rejection : the case of Chinese vegetable exports

This paper analyzes the factors associated with the rejection of products at ports of importer countries and remedial actions taken by producers in China by taking as an example one of the most competitive agro-food products of China: frozen vegetables. This paper provides an overview of the vegetable production and distribution system in China and the way in which China has been participating in exports of these products. Later sections will examine in detail the frozen vegetable sector in China, identify the causes of port rejections, and the actions taken by the Chinese government and by producers, processors and exporters to improve the quality of frozen vegetable exports.

Rice flows across regions in Madagascar

Although spatial disintegration of rice markets in Madagascar has been well documented, little is known about actual rice flows across regions. Using weekly collected unique data from rice markets in 22 regional capital cities for one year, this study explores the physical distribution of rice in Madagascar and reveals that rice flows from sufficient regions to deficit regions, along with geographical proximity, have positive effects on rice flow. In contrast, season factors, such as harvest/non-harvest periods and weather conditions have a negligible effect on rice flow. These findings suggest that rice flows generally follow a rational pattern despite the fact that market indicators indicate that rice trade across regions is underdeveloped.

Understanding traders' regional arbitage : the case of rice traders in Antananarivo, Madagascar

Many studies find that agricultural markets in developing countries are poorly integrated spatially. Traders' regional arbitrage plays a key role in integrating markets across space. We investigate the performance of regional arbitrage and the associated obstacles for rice traders in Antananarivo, Madagascar. On the basis of a trader-level biweekly survey spanning 2012–2013, we find that traders are not fully exploiting the regional arbitrage opportunities: most of them fail to purchase from the cheapest district and are paying higher prices than those in the cheapest district. One apparent obstacle is obtaining price information from many different regions. To reduce search costs, we provided regional price information via SMS to randomly selected traders, but found that this had a null-effect on improving arbitrage performance. Traders tend to concentrate on trading with a few fixed districts, even if they are informed about cheaper prices in other new districts, because they worry about quality uncertainty and the trustworthiness of new partners. These findings suggest that not only transmission of price information but also issues related to produce quality and matching prevent the performance of arbitrage and market integration.

Is there any premium for unobservable quality? : a hedonic price analysis of the Malagasy rice market

This paper examines if consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality in the absence of quality standards and/or quality grading systems and, if so, how they assess that unobservable quality, using a rice retail market in Madagascar as an example. In Madagascar, the lack of quality standards and/or grading systems for rice makes is considered to be one of the causes of the rice market's spatial disintegration. Thus, quality standards and grading systems will be necessary to increase the market's efficiency. We hypothesize that consumers and retailers use product origin and rice name as observable indictors of unobservable quality and test the hypothesis using hedonic price regressions. We find that the interaction terms of product origin and rice name significantly affect the price after controlling for both observable quality and spatial and temporal price variation, but that the contribution of product origin and rice name to rice price variation is smaller than spatial and temporal factors. We thus conclude that consumers pay a premium for unobservable quality throughout Madagascar. This finding implies that quality standards and/or grading systems will work in the Malagasy market and that improving market infrastructure such as roads and storage will make them even more effective.

The supply chain in East Asia

East Asia is a major tea-consuming and -producing area; however, few studies have examined the East Asian tea industry from the perspective of the supply chain. Based on field and desktop studies of the tea markets in Taiwan and China, this paper provides an overview of each market together with detailed case studies. In this analysis, the characteristics of the tea industry and the main problems in the current supply chain in terms of governance, upgrading, and food safety and quality control are identified. This paper will help fill the gap in studies of the East Asian tea industry from the perspective of the supply chain.

Does market upgrading benefit farmers? : market differentiation, contract farming, and professional cooperatives in China's pork processing industry

This study tested whether contract farming or farmers professional cooperatives (FPCs) improved the social benefit of pork production and income of breeding farmers in China. The main concern of this study is whether institutional arrangement like contract farming or FPCs actually improved the welfare of farmers as expected. To answer this question accurately, we estimated the differentiated market demand of pork products in order to quantify the benefit by transaction types. Our study finds that contract farming or FPCs improved the benefits of pork products, but farmer's income remained lower than that of traditional transaction types. This finding is new in terms of quantifying distribution of the economic values among sales outlets, agro-firms and farmers. It is more reliable because it explicitly captures impacts from both demand side and supply side by structural estimation. In practice, we need to keep it mind the bargaining power of small farmers will not improve instantly even when the contract farming or FPCs are introduced.

Agricultural efficiency of rice farmers in Myanmar : a case study in selected areas

This paper try to analyze unique data set for rice producing agricultural households in some selected areas of Bago and Yangon divisions to examine the households' profit efficiency and the relationship between farm and household attributes and profit inefficiency using a Cobb-Douglas production frontier function. The frequency distribution reveals that the mean technical inefficiency is 0.1627 with a minimum of 3 percent and maximum of 73 percent which indicates that, on average, about 16% of potential maximum output is lost owing to technical inefficiency in both studied areas. While 85% of the sample farms exhibit profit inefficiency of 20% or less, about 40% of the sample farms is found to exhibit technical inefficiency of 20% or less, indicating that among the sample farms technical inefficiency is much lower than profit inefficiency.

Is prohibiting land reallocation enough to promote development of farmland rental markets in China?

Prohibiting land reallocation improves tenure security, but it remains unclear whether this sufficiently facilitates the development of farmland rental markets in China. To fill this gap, we investigate how farmland rental activities are influenced by full-scale land reallocation (FSLR) and partial land reallocation (PLR), which differ in scale and imposition. Employing the instrumental-variables and the difference-in-differences approaches, we find that PLR substitutes relation-specific contracting in the markets, while FSLR complements arms-length contracting. The different impacts are attributable to the difference in imposition rather than scale. These findings suggest the need for further reforms.