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International audience; Main resource for human and animal nutrition, agricultural biomass has also high potential uses as substitute for non-renewable resources in other sectors (construction, chemistry, energy, etc.).It plays an important role towards the energetic transition. In that regard, public institutions, particularly at local level, highly support new biomass uses for food and non-food uses, for products (e.g. grains,livestock) and co-products (e.g. straw, manure), leading to value chain reorganizations and/or creations. To prevent from de-structuring the other existing value chains, or from escaping local energetic,environmental or socio-economic issues, it seems important to understand the interactions between value chains in place. For that aim, the framework of metabolism seems particularly relevant. It allowsan analysis of the flows of materials and energy occurring between nature and society, between different societies, and within societies. Interactions between value chains can be characterized bymaterial flows and an analysis of actors which produce or use agricultural products and co-products. However, due to value chain specialties, the complexity of actor networks and highly diverse localities,these evaluations are difficult to undertake at local scales. Our goal here is to present and discuss an approach to account for interaction within and between agricultural value chains, based on a representation of material metabolism coupled with an analysis of actors’ networks. First, we build a theoretical metabolism, based on public databases to: i) inform on potential agricultural products and coproducts, ii) gather general information on local actors. Second, we lead a survey to consolidate this metabolism from the actual flows and develop a reading grid of actors’ networks based on the forms of: i) circulation of material flows between actors; ii) organization and coordination of this circulation of material flows between actors; iii) synergies, dependencies and competitions between actors around these material flows. The main challenge is to structure these interactions in a global representation of the local agricultural metabolism. We show an application of the method on two French localities that are contrasted in terms of agriculture in: i) the North of the Aube department, an area specialized in large field crops; ii) the Vallée de la Drôme, farm fields are four times smaller and the agriculture is more diversified with different types of crops and livestock systems. This method can be used with local partners as a reflexive tool on agriculture and value chains and as a starting point for foresight studies.

In recent years, Italy has been seriously affected by meteorological events characterised by intense precipitations in a short period, causing significant damages (such as landslide, erosion and so on) especially where the territory management has been neglected for a long time; it must be considered that with climatic change these events will worsen over time. Given this situation the Public Administration should pursue the urgent goals of reducing risk and ensuring water safety, studying and executing appropriate solutions and measures to contain surface water such as detention basins and similar. These structures should ideally be located in extensive level agricultural areas (cultivated or not), choosing strategic sites along the rivers’ or streams’ bedwaters in order to manage the water runoff and control extreme floods. An event of flooding shows irregular frequency and it cannot be forecast certainly. Regarding the land involved by flooding prevention measures, a part of it may host permanent structures and/or tools for water detention, the other surface will contain waters which permanency on this land limits the landowner’s property right and firm’s economic activity, also damaging sometimes current and future crops. Acquiring suitable areas through an expropriation act is often a difficult burden to sustain for the Public Administration also because of their expensive management and maintenance costs. In this case flood easement may be a good balance between the exploitation of areas located in a strategic position for flooding detention and the usual agricultural activities carried out on that land. Most importantly, easement is only a right to use the land leaving the property right to the owner of that land. In Italy, easement is regulated by law (the Italian Civil Code considers different types of easement) and widely dealt with in the literature but there are still no national regulations about the particular type of agreement surveyed in this paper (flood easement); As yet, we still have no calculation criteria for the landowner’s compensation. In this work, which is still at a preliminary stage, the Authors analyse the legislation and the available literature and propose a methodology of calculation in case of flood easement compensation, viable in different areas and situations

Because agriculture is the economic backbone of most countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ethiopia, any meaningful sustainable development program in the continent must therefore be anchored in the sector. The concept for this study on agribusiness indicators was based on the vital role that agribusiness plays in agricultural development. The study focuses on agribusiness indicators (ABI) to identify and isolate the determining factors that lead private investors and other stakeholders to participate in agribusiness and to engage in discourse regarding its development. A more thorough empirical understanding of these determinants in turn can usefully inform the types of policy reforms that can promote agribusiness in Africa. In Ethiopia, the ABI team focused on the following success factors: a) access to critical factors of production of certified hybrid seeds, fertilizer, and mechanical input; b) enabling environment in terms of access of credit and transportation; and c) government expenditures on agriculture, and trade and regulatory policies that currently influence the agribusiness environment. The factors and indicators that the research team has included in this study are not exhaustive but rather are intended to serve as a pilot that could be scaled up to include more variables and countries. The findings of the study revealed the dominant role of the government in the seed and fertilizer markets. In the seed sub-sector, perennial shortages of both basic and certified seeds have greatly limited agricultural productivity in Ethiopia.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

Although Mozambique has considerable agricultural potential, rural poverty remains extremely high. This paper examines the extent to which global and domestic price distortions affect agricultural production and national poverty. The author develops a computable general equilibrium (CGE) and micro-simulation model of Mozambique that is linked to the results of a global model. This framework is used to examine the effects of eliminating global and national price distortions. Model results indicate that agriculture is adversely affected by current trade distortions due to policies in the rest of the world. While a removal of all merchandise trade distortions will reduce import prices, it will also raise agricultural production and reduce poverty. By contrast, removing only agricultural price distortions abroad will have little effect on Mozambique's agricultural sector. Model results indicate that Mozambique's own distortions are also biased against agriculture, with producers of processed agricultural products enjoying high protection levels. Removing these distortions causes a significant expansion of agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and a reduction in both poverty and inequality. The findings therefore suggest that removing own-country and rest-of-world distortions will have positive implications for agriculture and for the overall economy in Mozambique, and in particular it will reduce its poverty and inequality.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A. A description of the economies under study and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents (NRA and CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional chapters that follow. A summary is also provided of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions presented in chapter eleven that are based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and all the various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted are each of the key farm commodity markets globally. Then chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model that attempts to quantify the impacts on global markets, net farm incomes and welfare of the reforms since the early 1980s and of the policies still in place as of 2004. The chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets.

Despite reforms over the past quarter-century, world agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions such as the nominal rate of assistance and consumer tax equivalent provide measures of the degree of intervention, but they can be misleading as indicators of the true effects of those policies. By drawing on recent theoretical literature that provides indicators of the trade- and welfare-reducing effects of price and trade policies, this paper develops more-satisfactory indexes for capturing distortions to agricultural incentives. It then exploits the agricultural distortion database recently compiled by the World Bank to generate estimates of them for both developing and high-income countries over the past half century, based on a sample of 75 countries that together account for all but one-tenth of the world's population, gross domestic product (GDP) and agricultural production. While they are still only partial equilibrium measures, they provide a much better approximation of the true trade and welfare effects of sectoral policies without needing a formal model of global markets or even price elasticity estimates.

Earnings from farming in many developing countries have been depressed by a pro-urban bias in own-country policies as well as by governments of richer countries favoring their farmers with import barriers and subsidies. Both sets of policies, which reduce national and global economic welfare and contribute to global inequality and poverty, have been undergoing reform since the 1980s. Using the linkage model of the global economy and modifications to the pre-release of version 7 of the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) protection database for 2004, this paper seeks to compare the effect of those reforms to date with those that would come from removing remaining agricultural and trade policies. Two sets of results are thus presented: one showing the effects of policy reforms between 1980-84 and 2004, the other showing what the removal of remaining distortions as of 2004 could be. Both sets of results indicate improvements in the real value of agricultural output and exports, the real returns to farm land and unskilled labor, and real net farm incomes in most developing country regions despite the adverse effect on the international terms of trade for some developing countries that are net food importers or are enjoying preferential access to agricultural markets of high-income countries. Landowners in those high-income countries still offering their farmers price supports could readily afford to compensate them from the benefits of removing remaining agricultural protectionism.

Read Tuesday, 26th November, 1889, The Agricultural Statistics of Ireland were, as you are aware, from my last year's address, first systematically collected in the year 1847, immediately after the famine. They were, like all new undertakings, not as complete as could be desired, and in the year 1848 they were not collected in a complete form, owing to the unsettled state of the country. Allowing, therefore, for disturbing causes during the first five years of the collection of the Agricultural Statistics, I consider it advisable to commence this review with the figures furnished in the year 1851, thus giving us thirty-eight clear years of agricultural returns, which, I believe, are as accurate as any such large series of figures are likely to be in this or any other county.