CONSORTIUM PUBLICATIONS AND RELATED RESOURCES ON AGRICULTURAL POLICIES

× In both developed and developing countries, governments often intervene in the agriculture sector to support development and to respond to political-economy pressures, using trade policies or price support for particular agricultural commodities. To understand the full implications of agricultural policies, it is necessary to correctly measure the extent to which policies and their derivatives distort market prices of commodities, and to understand the implications of protection provided to other sectors that affects agricultural incentives through real exchange rate impacts. Multiple international organizations (IOs) provide assessment and measurement of agricultural incentives. However, a comprehensive and long-term global database would enable analysts and policymakers to compare and interpret the impact of policy across commodities, countries, and time. To facilitate construction and dissemination of such a database, the Ag-Incentives Consortium was formed in 2013 to bring together institutional efforts, including those of the Inter-American Development Bank, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Monitoring and Analysing Food and Agricultural Policies program of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO-MAFAP), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and World Bank, as well as the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM). The Ag-Incentives Consortium is the “International Organizations Consortium for Measuring the Policy Environment for Agriculture” and is based on the Memorandum of Understanding for Co-operative Activities on Agricultural Incentives Measurement signed by OECD, FAO-MAFAP, IDB, World Bank, and IFPRI. The Consortium has been supported by funding from PIM.

× Many governments intervene in agricultural markets. The reasons for doing so vary greatly: to keep food prices low for consumers; to support farm incomes; to reduce price volatility; and to meet other political objectives. Some policy interventions can have unforeseen consequences. Monitoring the levels of incentives in many countries provides information on changes in global markets, and measuring the impact of incentives helps governments to make necessary policy adjustments. Several international organizations have for some time been regularly monitoring agricultural incentives, but in an uncoordinated way. “Historically, global information and data on incentives for agricultural production have been widely scattered and not comparable,” says David Laborde, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). To address these issues, a group of leading international organizations joined with IFPRI and PIM in 2013 to form the Agricultural Incentives Consortium (Ag-Incentives). Ag-Incentives brings together data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the World Bank. IFPRI leads the harmonization and sharing of these data.