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This review, undertaken in close co-operation with the Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, assesses the performance of Vietnamese agriculture over the last two decades, evaluates Vietnamese agricultural policy reforms, discusses the policy framework for sustainable investment in agriculture and provides recommendations to address key challenges in the future.
The OECD Food and Agricultural Reviews provide comprehensive assessments, according to different angles, of countries’ agricultural policies, including OECD estimates of the level of support; major reform efforts and their potential impacts; or conduciveness of the broad policy framework to generating the innovation that will improve agricultural productivity sustainably.
This annual publication provides information on policy developments and related support to agriculture in OECD countries and selected partner economies, measured with the OECD Producer Support Estimate methodology. Countries covered represent about 80% of the global value added in agriculture. The report includes a general discussion on developments in agricultural policies and specific chapters for each country covered.
This brochure is published within the framework of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables established by OECD in 1962. It comprises explanatory notes and illustrations to facilitate the uniform interpretation of the Chinese Cabbage. This brochure illustrates the standard text and demonstrates the quality parameters on high quality photographs. Thus it is a valuable tool for the inspection authorities, professional bodies and traders interested in international trade in Chinese Cabbage.
Groundwater has provided great benefits to agriculture irrigation in semi-arid OECD countries, but its intensive use beyond recharge in certain regions has depleted resources and generated significant negative environmental externalities. The report provides a characterisation of the diversity of groundwater systems, reviews policies in OECD countries, and proposes a package of recommendations to ensure that groundwater can sustain its services to agriculture and contribute to climate change adaptation.
The repercussions of the 2007–2008 financial crisis have acted as an impetus to improve the quality and availability of statistical information. One such initiative addresses the importance of compiling a complete accounting of a nation’s wealth, and especially the wealth of households. This is of particular importance in view of the housing market’s role in the financial crisis in several countries.
The most valuable item on the households’ balance sheet is usually housing wealth which is composed of the value of the dwelling and its underlying land. Many countries experience difficulties in valuing land and in particular separating the value of the land from the value of the structure. To assist countries, the Eurostat-OECD compilation guide on land estimation represents the first comprehensive overview of conceptual and practical issues related to the compilation of the balance sheet item land in the national accounts, in total and by institutional sector.
The Eurostat-OECD compilation guide on land estimation was prepared by the Task Force on Land and other non-financial assets under the joint leadership of Eurostat and the OECD. Representatives from various European Union (EU) and non-EU OECD countries were represented as well as the European Central Bank.
This publication highlights the main conclusions of the Fishing for Development joint meeting, held in Paris in April 2014. The meeting was organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank (WB) to initiate a dialogue between the fisheries and development policy communities from member and partner countries and organizations of the OECD. It brought together delegates to the OECD Fisheries Committee and OECD Development Assistance Committee, representatives of partner developing countries invited by FAO, as well as experts and representatives from FAO, WB, non-governmental organizations and regional organizations. The meeting focused on issues central to promoting sustainable fisheries and aquaculture in developing, emerging and developed countries alike.
This publication also includes the background papers originally prepared to provide context for the issues addressed. It identifies questions for a future work agenda on policy coherence in fisheries and aquaculture, and makes evident the strong need for further dialogue between the fisheries and development communities at global and regional scales.
Knowledge investment supporting the adoption of environmentally friendly farm practices is a key driver behind innovation processes in agriculture, yet impact evaluations and financial assessments of existing initiatives remain scarce despite dramatic changes in orientation, organisation and intervention. This report examines the role, performance and impact of farm advisory services, training and extension initiatives in the OECD area to foster green growth in agriculture. Based on a series of case studies, the report discusses a range of methodological issues and the merits of the different types of providers, and identifies best practices in sustainable agricultural management.
This brochure is published within the framework of the Scheme for the Application of International Standards for Fruit and Vegetables established by OECD in 1962. It comprises explanatory notes and illustrations to facilitate the uniform interpretation of the Fresh Figs Standard. This brochure illustrates the standard text and demonstrates the quality parameters on high quality photographs. Thus it is a valuable tool for the inspection authorities, professional bodies and traders interested in international trade in Fresh Figs. The electronic version of this brochure is available on the OECD website.
This report summarises the current situation in fisheries and aquaculture, observing that in many parts of the world these sectors are at risk and do not reach their full potential. However, the prospects for sustained growth are good if reforms along the lines suggested by the OECD Green Growth Strategy are undertaken. The report emphasises the need for a strong, science-based approach to stock management for resource sustainability, combined with a transparent and reactive policy development cycle to ensure that fisheries deliver maximum possible benefits. The report shows that improved regulation to deal with environmental externalities and space competition is key to unlocking future growth potential of aquaculture.
Australia’s agriculture and food industries are well placed to contribute to the economy’s future growth given the robust prospects of global food demand and the continuing high international competitiveness of these sectors. There are, however, important challenges that call for new ways to exploit agricultural resources and human capital. The decade-long decline in agricultural productivity growth needs to be overcome, coupled with the need to accommodate uncertainties about the impacts of climate change and to respond to societal demands in the areas of sustainable development and animal welfare. The agro-food sector also needs to absorb exchange-rate and cost pressures created by the mining boom. To tap additional opportunities of the higher value food segments, Australian agri-businesses need new knowledge and capabilities to seize demand signals and value opportunities, particularly from more affluent consumers in Asian markets.
Agriculture and the agro-processing sector in Brazil have shown impressive growth over the past two decades. This has largely been driven by productivity improvements and structural adjustment resulting from broad economic reforms, as well as new technologies developed by agricultural science. Government policy and industry initiatives are increasingly focused on the sustainability of agricultural development.
The Canadian food and agriculture sector is for the most part competitive and export-oriented: although challenges and opportunities vary significantly between regions, primary agriculture benefits from an abundance of natural resources and faces limited environmental constraints. Negative environmental impacts of agriculture relate mainly to local water pollution by agricultural nutrients. Productivity growth, resulting from innovation and structural change, has driven production and income growth without significantly increasing pressure on resource use. Nonetheless, the capacity to innovate is crucial to take advantage of the growing and changing demand for food and agricultural products at the global level.
The Dutch food, agriculture and horticulture sector is innovative and export oriented, with high value-added along the food chain and significant world export shares for many products. Continuous adoption of innovation has permitted to reach high levels of productivity and sustained productivity growth, in particular at the farm level, in a context of increasing environmental regulatory constraints. The challenge is whether marginal improvements in current technologies and know-how will be enough to pursue current rates of productivity growth – sustainably – and whether the innovation system will be able to generate the new ideas that are needed to face future challenges, including those linked to climate change.
This book brings together a collection of papers prepared for the Global Forum on Agriculture that took place at the OECD in December 2014. It reviews current knowledge about agricultural policy and agricultural trade policy settings, and questions its pertinence in light of the profound market and structural changes that have been taking place in the global agro-food sector in recent decades. It aims to inform and assist policy-makers and negotiators as they seek to overcome the problems that have made the agricultural pillar of the Doha Agenda trade negotiations particularly difficult. The data and analysis presented cover OECD countries and major G20 and emerging economies that account for the great bulk of global food production, consumption and trade.
Many of the recent concerns about food security relate to perceived threats to current levels of food security, such as those due to price shocks or natural disasters. These threats concern the risk of food insecurity. This publication develops a risk-management tool to examine the robustness of policy responses to managing risks and uncertainty across a variety of different threats to food security, and applies the framework to an Indonesia case study.
Five risk scenarios were selected as major threats to food security in Indonesia, following a consultation process among stakeholders and policy makers, and assessed in terms of existing and alternative agricultural and social policies. The risk assessment shows that domestic economic and natural disaster scenarios are more important than global price hikes and that a policy strategy that concentrates on addressing a single source of risk, such as a price spike in international markets, may increase vulnerability to other sources of risk such as domestic crop failure. The analysis yields a number of specific policy recommendations, including targeting of social assistance programme using food vouchers or cash transfers.
This review assesses the performance of Colombian agriculture over the last two decades, evaluates Colombian agricultural policy reforms and provides recommendations to address key challenges in the future. The evaluation is based on the approach that agriculture policy should be evidence-based and carefully designed and implemented to support productivity, competitiveness and sustainability, while avoiding unnecessary distortions to production decisions and to trade. The report includes a special chapter focusing on agricultural innovation.
This report examines agricultural policies in Switzerland and makes recommendations concerning the role of regulations, reducing trade barriers and export subsidies, reducing direct payments to farmers and increasing incentives to produce high quality products at competitive prices, implementing regionally differentiated policies, and addressing sustainability of resources and animal welfare.
This publication contains statistics on fisheries in OECD member countries (with the exception of Austria, Israel and Slovenia) and some non-member economies (Argentina, Colombia, Latvia, Chinese Taipei, Thailand) from 2006 to 2013. Data provided concern fishing fleet capacity, employment in fisheries, fish landings, aquaculture production, recreational fisheries, government financial transfers, and imports and exports of fish.
The OECD Review of Fisheries provides information on developments in policies and activities in the fishing and aquaculture sectors of OECD countries and participating economies, mainly for the period 2012-13. This year’s edition includes Argentina, the People's Republic of China, Chinese Taipei, Indonesia and Latvia.
Part I overviews the activities in the sector and includes a chapter containing two-page snapshots outlining country summary statistics and key developments in the fisheries and aquaculture sectors. Additional country-level data and detail on institutional and policy backgrounds, based on contributions by participating countries and economies, are provided in the electronic version of this report.
This edition of the Agricultural Outlook – the twenty-first OECD edition and the eleventh prepared jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) – provides projections to 2024 for major agricultural commodities, biofuels and fish. The 2015 report provides a special focus on prospects and challenges for Brazilian agriculture.
The market projections not only cover OECD member countries (European Union as a region) but also FAO member countries, notably Brazil, the Russian Federation, India, People's Republic of China and South Africa.