The Overproduction Trap In U S Agriculture

This book emphasizes resource use and efficiency in the agricultural sector and offers facts and analytical concepts of interest to welfare economists, sociologists, and agricultural policy makers. Originally published in 1972

This book emphasizes resource use and efficiency in the agricultural sector and offers facts and analytical concepts of interest to welfare economists, sociologists, and agricultural policy makers. Originally published in 1972

After all the research on agricultural risk to date, the treatment of risk in agricultural research is far from harmonious. Many competing risk models have been proposed. Some new methodologies are largely untested. Some of the leading empirical methodologies in agricultural economic research are poorly suited for problems with aggregate data where risk averse behavior is less likely to be important. This book is intended to (i) define the current state of the literature on agricultural risk research, (ii) provide a critical evaluation of economic risk research on agriculture to date and (iii) set a research agenda that will meet future needs and prospects. This type of research promises to become of increasing importance because agricultural policy in the United States and elsewhere has decidedly shifted from explicit income support objectives to risk-related motivations of helping farmers deal with risk. Beginning with the 1996 Farm Bill, the primary set of policy instruments from U.S. agriculture has shifted from target prices and set aside acreage to agricultural crop insurance. Because this book is intended to have specific implications for U.S. agricultural policy, it has a decidedly domestic scope, but clearly many of the issues have application abroad. For each of the papers and topics included in this volume, individuals have been selected to give the strongest and broadest possible treatment of each facet of the problem. The result is this comprehensive reference book on the economics of agricultural risk.

The research published here constitutes a profound reflection on what is taking place in the world of agriculture at the threshold of the year 2000. The book attempts to go beyond a narrow sectoral analysis of the primary sector. It sets out to focus instead on the dynamic and innovative aspects of the agrotechnological system constituted by the complex interdependence of the agro-production, agro-food, agro-industrial and agro-ecological subsystems. The authors, internationally renowned scholars and scientists, tackle the most pressing contemporary economics issues from both a theoretical and policy-making standpoint. Three different lines of research are pursued concerning, first, the evolution and trends of world and European agricultural production, second, agricultural surplus formation and productivity dynamics in the economies of industrialized countries, and, lastly, the destination of agricultural outputs and land allotment under the impact of agro-bio-technologies.