Cereal grains are the most important calorie source in the Sudanese diet. An understanding of cereals in Sudan is important for maintaining efficient and sustainable agricultural and food production. This study analyzes Sudanese cereals by examining trends in cereal production, consumption, and trade during the past four decades and identifies the elements that might affect future production and import demand. The focus is sorghum, wheat, and millet. Data for various years were collected from the production and trade yearbooks of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

The first in a series of three papers focusing on Argentina, this paper analyzes issues pertinent to the relative advantages and disadvantages between the United States and Argentina for producing, transporting, processing, and marketing major agricultural commodities in the context of distribution to significant global markets. Designed as a tool for agribusiness students and prospective investment and trade partners, it outlines Argentina's economic, financial, and political history. The paper focuses on the past 15 years, with emphasis on the trade-related economic and political reforms in the presidencies of Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rúa. Appendices give background on two wars, the "Dirty War" and the Falkland Islands War, and outline the participation of Argentina as a founding member of Mercosur, a customs union.

Hypothetical bias is a persistent problem in stated preference studies. We propose and test a method for reducing hypothetical bias based on the cognitive dissonance literature in social psychology. A central element of this literature is that people prefer not to take inconsistent stands and will change their attitudes and behavior to make them consistent. We find that participants in a stated preference willingness-to-pay study, when told that a nonhypothetical study of similar goods would follow, state significantly lower willingness to pay than participants not so informed. In other words, participants adjust their stated willingness to pay to avoid cognitive dissonance from taking inconsistent stands on their willingness to pay for the good being offered.

In this book we assemble a range of evidence from a range of sources with a view to developing an improved understanding of recent trends in agricultural productivity around the world. The fundamental purpose is to better understand the nature of the long-term growth in the supply of food and its principal determinants. We pursue this purpose from two perspectives. One is from a general interest in the world food situation in the long run. The other is from an interest in the implications of U.S. and global productivity patterns for U.S. agriculture.

We analyze the potential impact of continuing the existing U.S. sugar program, replacing it with a standard program, and implementing the standard program with multilateral trade liberalization. Under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), duty-free sugar imports from Mexico will undermine the program’s ability to operate on a “no-cost” basis to U.S. taxpayers. As the Mexican beverage industry is likely to expand considerably its highfructose corn syrup use, the sugar thereby displaced will seek a market in the United States. Under these conditions, marketing allotments could not be utilized under current legislation and prices would likely fall to the loan rate. The government would accumulate significant sugar stocks. The replacement of the current sugar program by one similar to other major U.S. crop programs would solve the problem of stock accumulation and accommodate further trade liberalization under a new World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement or future bilateral trade agreements. Our analysis of recent WTO proposals suggests that a WTO agreement is unlikely to impose significant adjustment pressures on the U.S. sugar market beyond those created by NAFTA. The adoption of a standard program would make it easier for the United States to meet its commitments under a new WTO agreement in terms of reductions in trade-distorting amberbox support. Moving to a standard program would increase the costs of the program for taxpayers but would lower costs for sugar users. Given reasonable assumptions about program parameters, the principal program cost would likely be through direct payments rather than through countercyclical or loan-deficiency payments. These costs could be lower than the maximum estimated here, because of limitations on payments to individual producers.

China and India are two of the world's biggest countries and potentially large markets for U.S. agricultural products. This study reports the assessment by midwestern agricultural firms of doing business in the two countries. The data, collected by mail questionnaire, suggests that China posed less of a problem than did India with respect to economic and market conditions, tariff and investment barriers, and physcial and cultural barriers. On the other hand, India posed less of a problem than did China with respect to language, protection of property rights, and the legal system. Firms already doing business in these countries had more favorable comments than those with no previous experience. The study also reports results of telephone interviews with selected firms. These conversations provide a more personal account of challenges faced by firms that are testing markets in the two countries.

This conference was really an outgrowth of an earlier conference on Structural Changes in Commercial Agriculture (CAED Report 24) held in Chicago, April 12-14, 1965. While the earlier conference emphasized structural changes in the agricultural industry and their implications for education and extension, the 1967 conference focused on research.

Branding strategies centering on the geographical origins of a product can provide a basis for differentiating commodity products. The use of such "geographical indications" (or GIs) can involve unique quality characteristics associated with a particular location or quality images that are based on the history, tradition, and folklore in a region. In this paper we describe the benefits and pitfalls (such as the threat of new entrants, oversupply, the broadening of boundaries to include more producers, and limiting generic use of such names) of using GI branding strategies. We also focus on trademark issues germane to a company's ability to (1) adopt GI-based trademarks as a means of gaining a competitive advantage and (2) protect the rights associated with such marks in order to sustain this source of competitive advantage.

This paper offers an assessment of the competitiveness and marketability of vegetable oils and oatmeals, and evaluates plants and processing equipment used for oilseeds in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The analysis will aid midwestern firms in the oilseed industry by providing comprehensive information about technological and market opportunities in the Baltic States.

The land-grant institutions of the United States are almost unique among the facilities for higher education ana research relating to agriculture in the western world and in other countries. They have brought the natural sciences to bear on the technical problems of agriculture at least as effectively as have the various agricultural colleges and agricultural departments of universities in other western countries. But their special contribution, on average not matched elsewhere, has been to make the social sciences meaningful in the production, marketing and distribution of food and fibers. This marriage of the natural and social sciences, with a high standard of economics at the core, has played an extremely important role in the exceptional agricultural progress of the United States, to a large measure as a result of close association of academic workers with an agricultural extension service which both in range and depth of its activities cannot be matched by other countries and which is part of the land-grant system. The record of their own achievement is, by itself, one of the most important pieces of instruction that land-grant institutions can bring to the rest of the world, especially to the underdeveloped countries where agriculture is too frequently despised by those who have received a high school or university education.