• CONCEPT NOTE
• AGENDA
• PARTICIPANTS

With South Asia increasingly trying to move from food self-sufficiency towards high-value agriculture, the region's globalization strategy continues to center on agriculture. This transition raises issues such as WTO, trade liberalization, and agriculture sector domestic reforms. It is understood that for the region to fully participate in the international markets, its agriculture sector needs to be competitive. Becoming globally competitive requires basic domestic reforms in agriculture that remove inefficiencies in the production, marketing, and distribution systems. The methods for analyzing agriculture market reforms for input and output markets remain poorly understood and the analysis that is undertaken is rarely applied in the region's policymaking context. To enhance the region's capacity for analyzing the impacts and outcomes of domestic market reforms, a methods workshop will be organized in Islamabad, Pakistan from September 20-24, 2004 for researchers, policymakers, trainers, and postgraduate university professors.

The workshop will examine the methods for analyzing market reforms in South Asian agriculture in a global setting. It will introduce methods of assessing various agricultural support measures and the various types of subsidies used for input and output production and marketing. Specifically, output markets such as the foodgrain market, which play an important role in determining agriculture market efficiency in these countries will be analyzed along with input markets such as seeds, fertilizer, power, and irrigation. Understanding and analyzing the various forms of supports and domestic market reforms that are likely to be introduced would help in deriving policy implications for South Asian agriculture. The need for a renewed agenda for domestic markets reforms will also be emphasized.

The objectives of the workshop are as follows:

1. Understanding the domestic reform challenges facing South Asian agriculture;
2. Strengthening capacity for analyzing agriculture output markets;
3. Developing capacity for analyzing domestic reforms for high-value agriculture; and
4. Strengthening capacity for analyzing input markets.

The training's content will be based on ongoing research that has been conducted under the South Asia Initiative of IFPRI. Researchers of these studies will constitute the core team of resource persons for conducting the various sessions of the workshop. A tentative program is attached for discussion among the partners and collaborators in the region.