text: Methodology in developed countries a) Western View | Labour Economics | Economic Equilibrium
  Methodology in developed countries a) Western View
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  Methodology in developed countries a) Western View Conventional thinking in westernized countries is that maximizing the farmers profit is the
  surest way of maximizing agricultural production; the higher a farmers profit, the greater the effort that will be forthcoming, and the greater the risk the farmer is willing to take. Place into the hands of farmers the largest number and highest quality tools possible (tools is used here to refer to improved production techniques, improved seeds, secure land tenure, accurate weather forecasts, etc.) However, it is left to the individual farmer to pick and choose which tools to use, and how to use them, as farmers have intimate knowledge of their own land and local conditions. As with other businesses, a percentage of the profits are normally reinvested into the business in the hopes of increasing production, and hence increase future profits. Normally higher profits translate into higher spending on technologies designed to boost production, such as drip irrigation systems, agriculture education, and greenhouses. An increased profit also increases the farmers incentive to engage in double-cropping, soil improvement programs, and expanding usable area.
  b) Food justice An alternative view takes a collective approach to achieve food security. It notes that globally enough food is produced to feed the entire world population at a level adequate to ensure that everyone can be free of hunger and fear of starvation. That no one should live without enough food because of economic constraints or social inequalities is the basic goal. This approach is often referred to as food justice and views food security as a basic human right. It advocates fairer distribution of food, particularly grain crops, as a means of ending chronic hunger and malnutrition. The core of the Food Justice movement is the belief that what is lacking is not food, but the political will to fairly distribute food regardless of the recipients ability to pay. c) Food sovereignty A third approach is known as food sovereignty; though it overlaps with food justice on several points, the two are not identical. It views the business practices of multinational corporations as a form of neocolonialism. It contends that multinational corporations have the financial resources available to buy up the agricultural resources of impoverished nations, particularly in the tropics. They also have the political clout to convert these resources to the
  exclusive production of cash crops for sale to industrialized nations outside of the tropics, and in the process to squeeze the poor off of the more productive lands. Under this view subsistence farmers are left to cultivate only lands that are so marginal in terms of productivity as to be of no interest to the multinational corporations. Likewise, food sovereignty holds it to be true that communities should be able to define their own means of production and that food is a basic human right. With several multinational corporations now pushing agricultural technologies on developing countries, technologies that include improved seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides, crop production has become an increasingly analyzed and debated issue. Many communities calling for food sovereignty are protesting the imposition of Western technologies on to their indigenous systems and agency. Those who hold a "food sovereignty" position advocate banning the production of most cash crops in developing nations, thereby leaving the local farmers to concentrate on subsistence agriculture. In addition, they oppose allowing low-cost subsidized food from industrialized nations into developing countries, what is referred to as "import dumping". Import dumping also happens by way of food aid distribution through programs like the USA's "Food for Peace" initiative.
  Economically and socially sustainable European Agriculture Multi-functionality is at the heart of the European Model of Agriculture. This means that together with competitive food, fibre and energy production farming also delivers other services for society as a whole. These services, which are closely linked to food and fibre production, include safeguarding viable rural societies and infrastructures, balanced regional development and rural employment, maintenance of traditional rural landscapes, biodiversity, protection of the environment, and high standards of animal welfare and food safety. These services reflect the concerns of consumers and taxpayers. As European farmers provide these multifunctional services for the benefit of society as a whole, which often incur additional costs without a compensating market return, it is necessary and justified to reward them through public funds. In most European countries family farms are the key element in fulfilling the objectives of the European Model of Agriculture. However, there are significant differences in the production patterns, farm sizes and natural conditions and also production costs within and between the Member States. This consequently means that the sizes and types of production units also vary considerably in different parts of Europe. A key element in the European Model of Agriculture is that different production models should be allowed to co-exist along each other as long as they conform to the above-mentioned overall objectives of the European Model of Agriculture.
  In the European context the sustainable development aspects of farming are of special importance. The objectives of European agricultural policy include not only keeping the environment within the farm in a good environmental condition and reducing negative environmental effects of production but also maintaining traditional landscapes and safeguarding biodiversity and animal welfare. By optimizing the use of fertilisers and minimising the use of chemicals the implementation of the policy can lead to remarkable improvements of soil and waters. In fact many of the measures of the Community rural development policy and the cross compliance requirements in the Single Farm Payment system ensure safeguarding the environment, enforce animal welfare, food safety and quality, which are important for the European citizens and consumers. Sustainable development in agriculture also means that the economic conditions of farming are safeguarded. This also secures socially sustainable development of the sector. Even today about 56 % of the European population lives in rural areas. Maintenance of viable rural societies would be impossible, if the economic conditions would drastically change in a short period of time. This is especially true in remote, sparsely populated areas, which lack business potential and market opportunities. By maintaining farming and developing new activities and services in rural areas, society can better provide the public services for people living in rural areas as well as for the urban population seeking recreational opportunities. At the same time, European cultural heritage can also be maintained and social problems relating to migration from rural areas to cities avoided. Within this broader context the general acceptability of policy can be maintained in a more sustained and consensual manner. In the reformed CAP the principle that farmers should produce according to market demands is by now well established. Decoupled direct support for farmers gives them an increased freedom of choice in their production decisions. The situation on the markets should now have a central role in farmers' decision making. This should also mean a shift from quantity of production to quality of production. Consumers in Europe and worldwide are able to spend more on foodstuffs, but at the same time they will increasingly do so only if they are convinced by the taste, the nutritional value and healthiness, production method, origin and the safety of the product. However, a part of the population in Europe still has rather low income and they tend to put emphasis on the low prices of products. Consumers are also becoming an increasingly heterogeneous group, each segment of which is demanding products with differentiated characteristics. Quality production and the use of traditional names can also give European production a competitive edge in the world markets. At the same time there are also problems in how the markets function. Consumers rather often state their expectations in the polls differently compared to their actual buying decisions in the shops. The competition between the retail trade chains stresses strongly the importance of price. This has led to a situation where differing of quality and quality pricing is of smaller importance. The price the farmer gets from a product may be almost the same regardless of its final presentation to the consumer. There is much room for improvement on how the correct market information reaches farmers and how information concerning products and their production methods reaches consumers. Improvements in this respect would benefit all the actors of the food chain. In the reformed CAP farmers can better adjust their production according to market demand.
  This applies also to possible alternatives to traditional agricultural production. The production of biomass for energy purposes can offer farmers a feasible alternative compared to traditional crop production in the future. Increased production of biomass may also have a positive impact on the agricultural commodity markets globally. The average size of a farm in the Member States has increased quite rapidly in the past years and will continue to do so. An increased role of market forces and technological developments have had a major impact on this development. For instance, prices have largely been adapted to world market levels and thus fluctuations of the world markets now tend to affect also the European producer prices more directly. On the other hand new laboursaving production methods have increased productivity and made the increase in the average farm size possible without putting an excessive load on the farm family work force. At the same time it has to be noted that the possibilities for structural change are different in different areas of Europe. In many areas of Europe a substantial proportion of farmers have had to give up their production. Diversification of production, quality production and the optimal use of market opportunities have allowed farmers to cope better with the economic changes in farming. It is therefore important to encourage farmers to take up new technologies, to adopt new innovations and to make new investments. It is also important to encourage setting up new businesses and to promote innovation in the rural areas as well as in the agribusiness sector. In promoting these actions the Rural Development measures are extremely important. Competitive, market-oriented production as well as quality production will mean that also in the future European agriculture can have a role to play in the world markets, where the growing population and the changing consumption habits create new marketing possibilities especially in the newly industrialised countries of the world. It has to be also recognized that there is a real need for simplification of the CAP and for a reduction in the administrative burden for farmers and administrations in order to reduce costs for businesses and ensure that the European citizens receive value for money. The Policy Evaluation Model (PEM) The starting point for such a model development is the PEM, a partial equilibrium model of the agricultural sector developed at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2001), which has been used to model transfer efficiency and welfare impacts in a number of OECD countries, as well as other issues, such as production responses to policy changes and the impact of risk on farmers decisions.2 The PEM is a market model, where output and factor markets are linked, and distributional effects are determined by the impacts that policies have on factor incomes and by households command over those incomes. In the PEM, supplies of agricultural commodities are represented by aggregate production functions, in which factors (land, labor, capital) and other intermediate inputs combine to produce output. Supply can be seen as originating from a single producer for each agricultural commodity, or equivalently, many identical ones. Similarly, the demand for agricultural goods is aggregate, represented by a single demand function for each good (either a single consumer or many identical ones). In equilibrium, supply must equal demand to clear all markets. If prices are determined in world markets, net exports fill the gap. Otherwise, domestic prices adjust to ensure that the supply- demand equilibrium is achieved. Similar
  equilibrium conditions apply to the supply and demand of factors, whose equilibrium prices are determined within the economy. Agricultural producers are price takers who, given their technologies, select the levels of output and derived input demands that maximise profits. This implies producing where the marginal cost just equals the market price of output, and the marginal value product of each input equals the per unit price. Demand is the sum of all consumer demands and intermediate input demands for agricultural output inside (and outside) the economy. In the PEM, it is represented as a single demand equation for each commodity. If, at a given price, the supply of an agricultural commodity exceeds the demand, either the price will fall (provoking an adjustment in farmers production decisions) or the surplus will be exported onto the world market, at the given world price. The converse applies for the case where the demand exceeds the supply. In this adjustment process, all related markets are affected. For example, a decrease in agricultural price will trigger a reduction not only in output but also in the demand for labour, land, and other inputs. Each of these input markets, in turn, will adjust, and their equilibrium quantities and prices will change. In this way, changes in agricultural prices create repercussions in other parts of the agricultural economy. The PEM was designed to pick up the aggregate effects within the agricultural sector. A Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model would take this one step further, by effectively nesting the PEM within a model of the rest of the national economy, capturing rural-urban linkages and other economy-wide effects. In order for the market for a good to be well defined and depicted by a single aggregate supply and demand function, the good as well as those producing and consuming it must be relatively homogeneous. The PEM assumes that each agricultural good is homogeneous, as are all inputs with the exception of land. Land is assumed to be heterogeneous but can be transferred (imperfectly) from one use to another. In practice, the farmer (or many identical farmers) in the model can allocate and reallocate land across different uses, including wheat, coarse grains, oilseeds, rice, other arable uses, milk pasture, beef pasture and other agricultural uses. The possibilities for transforming land from one use to another are represented by elasticities of transformation. The possibilities are bracketed by two extremes. It is possible that a given hectare of land (say, in rice) cannot be converted to a different use (say, oilseeds). In this case, the elasticity of transforming land from rice to oilseeds is zero. At the other extreme, it is conceivable that a farmer could easily shift a given hectare of land from corn to sorghum that is, that land is readily transferable between these commodities. In this case, the elasticity of transformation would be large. There is a wide range of possible elasticities in between these two extremes. The elasticity of transformation of land from one activity to another is extremely important for policy analysis, because it is a key to farmers ability to adjust to price shocks. The developers of the PEM made an effort to obtain the most realistic estimates available of aggregate elasticities of transformation for land, drawing from studies by experts in each of the six OECD countries for which the PEM was developed (Canada, the European Union, Japan, Mexico, Switzerland and the United States). Factor shares required to calibrate the constant elasticity of transformation (CET) functions used in the model were also obtained from expert studies, along with price elasticities of factor supplies and commodity demands.
  This way of modelling land allocations is a major strength of the PEM. It avoids making the unrealistic assumption that land is perfectly transferable across activities or that land is fixed within activities. Its reliability obviously depends on the extent to which the elasticities used in the model approximate the true substitutability of land across production activities. In contrast to land, capital (cows and other farm-owned) is assumed to be perfectly substitutable across crop activities but not substitutable between beef and dairy production and other activities. Purchased factors, including labour, are generally assumed to be perfectly substitutable across activities. The exceptions are concentrate feed, which is used only in livestock activities, and chemicals and irrigation, which are not used for livestock. Agricultural household models In its dual role as producer and consumer, the household makes production, labour allocation and consumption decisions that may be interdependent upon one another. In its most general conceivable form, the households objective is to maximise a discounted future stream of expected utility from a list of consumption goods including home-produced goods, purchased goods, and leisure, subject to what may be a large set of constraints. In practice, research focus, analytical tractability, and available data result in significant simplifications of both the objective function and the constraints. Most agricultural household models are static and assume that prospects are certain or, equivalently, that households are risk neutral. Constraints typically include cash income, family time and endowments of fixed productive assets, and production technologies (all of which may be combined into a single fullincome constraint if markets function smoothly; see Singh, Squire and Strauss, 1986), and prices of inputs, outputs, and non- produced consumption goods. Price-related constraints either fix prices exogenously (the case of household tradables with perfect markets) or, in the case of missing markets, determine an internal shadow price, at which the households demand for a good equals its output. The solution to a household-farm model yields a set of core equations for outputs, input demands, consumption demands, and either prices (for household non-tradables) or marketed surplus (for household tradables). In the case of produced goods, marketed surplus is output minus household consumption. In the case of labour, it is the households labour demand minus its labour supply, or net wage-labour supply. The solution to the household-farm model represents all dependent or endogenous variables as functions of exogenous variables (prices of tradables, farm assets, household time constraint, other household characteristics), usually including some that may be influenced by policy (e.g., market price supports). The form of this solution, particularly the interactions between production and consumption that are a trademark of household-farm models, are extremely sensitive to assumptions about the extent to which households are integrated into product and factor markets. Comparative Statics in an Agricultural Household Model A key motivation for developing agricultural household models has been to analyse agricultural policies in a less- developed country context. Like with the PEM, such analysis is based on comparative statics with parameterised models. Ideally, the parameters are estimated econometrically using household-farm survey data. Analytically, agricultural household models resolve the apparent paradox of a positive own-
  price elasticity of demand for food in farm households, as well as the puzzle of sluggish marketed-surplus responses to food-price changes in less-developed countries. Empirical models, using micro-survey data, have made it possible to estimate the magnitude of supply and marketed-surplus elasticities in a number of different country settings, while confirming quantitatively the importance of using household-farm, rather than simply household or farm, models to analyse rural economies. We can illustrate comparative statics in a basic household-farm model as follows: Consider an increase in the (market or policy-determined) price of staples. The immediate effect of the price increase is to raise the marginal product of all inputs, including labour. The standard profit-maximizing rules that apply to the firm also apply to the household as producer: both hire inputs at the point where the marginal value product of the input equals the input price. Thus, the higher marginal value product of labour results in increased labour demand for staple production. In a household that uses its labour both to produce on the family farm and to sell on the labour market, an immediate effect of the staple-price increase is to allocate more labour to on-farm production and less to wage work, because the opportunity cost of labour on the farm has gone up. Alternatively (and, in the basic model, equivalently), it may continue to supply labour to the market while hiring workers needed to expand staple production and maximise profits. In any case, the on-farm production effect for the crop whose price has increased is unambiguously positive, given the usual assumptions of production economics. As a consumer, the household now faces a higher staple price; however, it also experiences an increase in its income due to higher profits from farm production, leading to a positive income effect competing with the negative Stutsky effects outlined above. The effect on household consumption of the crop whose price has risen becomes ambiguous; it depends on the slope of the households utility function as well as the magnitude of the profit effect. In the case of a staple-price increase and perfect hired-labour market, there is no ambiguity on the labour side: the opportunity cost of leisure remains the same, equal to the market wage; the initial increase in the marginal value product of labour on the farm, due to the staple price change, is erased by the increased demand for labour on the farm (due to the assumptions of a fixed wage plus decreasing marginal physical product of labour); and the increase in income, due to higher profit from staple production, unambiguously increases leisure demand (reducing family labour supply), assuming that leisure is a normal good. The structure of markets in which the household is embedded is critical in shaping the response to exogenous policy and other shocks. A key assumption of most agricultural household models is that the household can obtain perfect substitutes for family labour in local labour markets and conversely, that it can sell its own labour at a given market wage. This permits the household to decouple production from leisure: in response to a policy or market change, it can increase production (and demand more labour) while at the same time consuming more leisure, by hiring workers to fill the resulting excess demand for labour. Estimated household-farm models have been used to analyse a multitude of policy issues relating to agricultural development. The early uses were concerned primarily with farm price policy. The level at which agricultural terms of trade are set has wide implications for both efficiency and equity. Structure of a DREM
  The households in a DREM might include: (1) commercial farms on large landholdings, which behave more like firms than like households; (2) net-surplus producing family farms on medium and small holdings, typical of small owner-operated farms of medium productivity; (3) subsistence and infra-subsistence household farms, typical of small- scale, low productivity agriculture, frequently operating under marginal conditions and incomplete markets; and (4) landless rural households. This typology works well to describe the socioeconomic landscape of many rural economies. Each household type has its own production technologies and access to outside markets (i.e., transaction costs), as well as its own consumption demands. DREMS may include different technologies to produce grain, from subsistence methods using ox-and-plough technology to relatively capital-intensive commercial production. Households often engage in other production and labour market activities that vary from one household to another. They have different access to domestic and/or international migration. Finally, while commercial farmers are integrated with outside markets, subsistence farmers are isolated from markets by high transaction costs for their produce. Agents in a PEM are commercial farmers who maximise their profits. Those in a DREM are households assumed to maximise their utility from consumption goods, both home-produced and purchased, subject to cash income, technologies, time, access - to-migration, and selfsufficiency constraints that set consumption equal to production for subsistence maize households. The solution yields a set of demands for labour and land inputs into each activity, including migration, and consumption demands. For commercial maize households, the price of maize is given by outside markets. For subsistence households, maize production and demand are guided by an internal shadow price that follows from the subsistence constraint. DREMs explicitly model interactions among households and add a third type of price: prices exogenous to individual households but determined by the interaction of supply and demand in local markets. Endogenous prices result when transaction costs are high outside but not within the rural economy. Land rents and wages often are endogenous in a DREM. In the textbook farm household model (Singh, Squire and Strauss, 1986), land is a fixed input and thus implicitly has a shadow price that varies across households. This may be a reasonable assumption when policies, customs or other considerations impede the smooth functioning of local land markets, as often is the case in developing countries. However, it is not reasonable when there is significant activity in local land rental markets, as in most OECD countries. Often, there is significant variation in the agricultural wage across the countryside and between rural and urban areas, suggesting endogenous rural wages or at least wage rigidities. Where migration is an option, access to migrant labour markets may not be uniform but rather geographically concentrated and shaped by networks of family contacts at migrant destinations and other local and household-specific variables (Munshi, 2003). Daily agricultural worker wages in Mexico ranged from 50 to 140 pesos in summer 2002. Where farm households face high costs of market access to sell their output and/or purchase consumption goods or inputs, the prices of these goods and inputs may also be endogenous. Both land rents and wages are treated as endogenous in a PEM. However, differences in land rents and wages among rural household groups are ignored, as is the possibility that different farm households have different market access and thus face different prices. Endogenous local prices are incorporated into the model through general-equilibrium constraints for non- tradables. These constraints equate the local supply and demand. A
  nonbinding constraint would imply trade at an exogenous market price. Potential impacts of policy shocks in a DREM are complex because of the large number of interacting agricultural households, each with its own production technology, market access, and consumption demands. They involve direct effects (e.g., the effect of price changes on production by commercial farms) as well as indirect effects (changes in the commercial farm households demand for goods and services from other households, or effects transmitted to subsistence households through local land and labour markets). Signing as well as quantifying the total impacts of policy shocks cannot be done analytically; it requires a programming approach. The solution to a DREM includes, for each household group, a set of core equations for outputs, input demands, migration, consumption demands, and either prices (for nontradables) or marketed surplus (for tradables). It also includes aggregate outcomes, as in a PEM. However, the aggregate outcomes are shaped by interactions among households that are not captured by the PEM. As in a PEM, once the base model is created, it becomes the starting point for policy experiments.