This paper examines the environment within which West African countries are designing their regional self-reliance food security strategy following the Uruguay Round Agreements on Agriculture (URAA). The self-reliance strategy combines regionally-coordinated domestic food production with food imports. Three aspects of the URAA-food security linkages were emphasized in this study. First, while the regional model may increase efficiency in regional food production and distribution systems, it may also restrain the flexibility and/or the effectiveness of using tariff protection when needed. Second, a formal test of structural change in food availability suggests that there have been increases in average per capita food supply in the post-URAA period. Third, under a scenario of URAA-led increases in food prices, food access may be weakened in West African net-food purchasing households, even when regional food production responded to price incentives. Besides the macro linkages emphasized in this study, microeconomic and anthropometric linkages between food security and URAA are equally important and should be addressed in subsequent studies.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Michigan State University, Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics in its series Staff Papers with number
11746.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: