On Planning for Development:
Agribusiness
rural development - agrarian policies - agribusiness - landgrab - food - migration - poverty
- globalization
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From FAO, The State of Food and
Agriculture 1997, part III
Agriculture
and industry have traditionally been viewed as two separate sectors
both in terms of their characteristics and their role in economic
growth. Agriculture has been considered the hallmark of the first stage
of development, while the degree of industrialization has been taken to
be the most relevant indicator of a country’s progress along the
development path. Moreover, the proper strategy for growth has often
been conceived as one of a more or less gradual shift from agriculture
to industry, with the onus on agriculture to finance the shift in the
first stage.
This view, however, no longer appears to be appropriate. On the one
hand, the role of agriculture in the process of development has been
reappraised and revalued from the point of view of its contribution to
industrialization and its importance for harmonious development and
political and economic stability. On the other hand, agriculture itself
has become a form of industry, as technology, vertical integration,
marketing and consumer preferences have evolved along lines that
closely follow the profile of comparable industrial sectors, often of
notable complexity and richness of variety and scope. This has meant
that the deployment of resources in agriculture has become increasingly
responsive to market forces and increasingly integrated in the network
of industrial interdependencies. Agricultural products are shaped by
technologies of growing complexity, and they incorporate the results of
major research and development efforts as well as increasingly
sophisticated individual and collective preferences regarding
nutrition, health and the environment. While one can still distinguish
the phase of production of raw materials from the processing and
transformation phase, often this distinction is blurred by the
complexity of technology and the extent of vertical integration: the
industrialization of agriculture and development of agroprocessing
industries is thus a joint process which is generating an entirely new
type of industrial sector.
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Róbinson Rojas -1997
Notes on agribusiness in the
1990s
The enormous economic-political power that transnational corporations
in agribusiness can exercise in the host countries where they operate
comes mainly from the links between production and trade in what is
called 'vertical integration'.
United Nation's World Investment Report 1996, "Investment, Trade and
International Policy Arrangements", U.N., 1996, describes the dynamics
driving agribusiness towards oligopolistic markets:
"...renewable resources products are imported by firms of the home
country (as a rule, a developed country), normally in the first
instance
through arm's length contracts, i.e. by trade between independent
companies. Then, for various reasons -ranging from the minimization of
transaction costs (such as the need to ensure the security of supplies,
and thus reduce the costs of accomodating potential opportunism on the
part of an independent supplier) to the exploitation of economies of
scale, and depending on the resource involved -home-country firms
undertake FDI in a backward vertical integration process to internalize
markets for raw materials and thus assume control of foreign
activities...
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S. Raghavan/S. Chatterjee (June
24, 2001)
How your chocolate may be tainted
DALOA, Ivory Coast - There may be a hidden ingredient in the chocolate
cake you baked, the candy bars your children sold for their school
fund-raiser o that fudge ripple ice cream cone you enjoyed on Saturday
afternoon.
Slave labor.
Forty-three percent of the world's cocoa beans, the raw material in
chocolate, come from small, scattered farms in this poor West African
country. And on some of the farms, the hot, hard work of clearing the
fields and harvesting the fruit is done by boys who were sold or
tricked into slavery. Most of them are
between the ages of 12 and 16. Some are as young as 9.
The lucky slaves live on corn paste and bananas. The unlucky ones are
whipped, beaten and broken like horses to harvest the almond-sized
beans that are made into chocolate treats for more fortunate children
in Europe and America.
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C.Hines 1984
Agribusiness. A block to
Africa's food self-reliance
While Africans are dying of hunger, huge transnational agribusiness
corporations continue to amass profits by exporting food from those
same countries. Colin Hines comments on this obscene paradox:
"The Ethiopian famine, and the world's response to it, together with
similar events in the Sudan and elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, mean
that once again Africa is being labelled "the hunger continent".
This onslaught of bads news can easily lead to a fatalistic despair
that
can blind people to the complexities behind the media images. It can
also obscure the reasons why the famine happened in the first place,
and
hamper a consideration of what can be done.
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9 April 2004:
Farming
is one of the biggest global environmental threat, says new book |
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Global Agribusiness
Information Network (GAIN)
Welcome to AgribusinessOnline, a free market intelligence and technical
information service for agribusiness professionals. AgribusinessOnline
is brought to you as a free service by Fintrac Inc. as
part of its mandate to disseminate market intelligence and new
technologies to farmers and other agribusinesses worldwide. It was
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US Asia Regional Agribusiness
Project
The purpose of the Asia Regional Agribusiness Project (RAP) was to
increase and continue the effectiveness of USAID mission agribusiness
projects and programs in promoting market efficiency and trade and
investment in an environmentally sustainable manner. RAP provided a
mechanism for coordinating mission, bureau, and other USAID and U.S.
private sector and government agribusiness development efforts in Asia.
RAP assistance was used primarily in improving private sector
agribusiness performance and participation in Asia, particularly as
they relate to the development of joint ventures with U.S.
agribusiness.RAP activities included:
1) improving regional market transparency,
2) creating a better understanding of regional market support
infrastructure,
3) defining product quality standards for market entry;
4) identifying solutions to agribusiness development environmental
concerns;
5) serving as a regional liaison with the U.S. private sector;
6) incorporating gender concerns into mission agribusiness efforts;
and
7) addressing key regional agribusiness development issues that
transcend individual country programs.
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Centro de Documentación de
Desarrollo Rural
El Proyecto CEDERUL es un Portal en Internet, es un
Grupo internacional e interdisciplinar de expertos en Desarrollo
Sostenible, son Proyectos de Investigación y de Ayuda al Desarrollo,
son Publicaciones, son Jornadas, Congresos y Seminarios, es enseñanza
on line…es un referente para quienes trabajan por un desarrollo
sostenible. En septiembre de 1989 se crea la Escuela Universitaria
Politécnica de Huesca de la Universidad de Zaragoza. Su entonces
Rector, Dr. Vicente Camarena encarga al Dr. Enrique Sáez la
Direccción del nuevo Centro universitario que impartirá las enseñanzas
de Ingeniería Técnica Química e Ingeniería Técnica Agrícola.
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