Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top

1999 | Book

Introduction: Visible Hands Read chapter Read first chapter

Agricultural Markets from Theory to Practice

Field Experience in Developing Countries

Editor: Barbara Harriss-White

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Included in: Professional Book Archive

Login to get access
insite
SEARCH

Table of Contents

Frontmatter

Introduction: Visible Hands

1. Introduction: Visible Hands
Abstract
In the twentieth century, exchange has triumphed over other forms of circulation. One form of exchange, market exchange, has been allowed to encircle the globe and penetrate deeply into societies. It is therefore a matter of no mean irony that so little is known about how markets work in developing countries. Discourse on markets generally proceeds on two tacks: backwards — making inferences from indicators of outcomes; or forwards — making deductions from theory. In between there is a rather small space filled by empirical research, relating with discomfort both to theoretical preoccuptions and to performance outcomes, which too often have been reduced by economists to prices. It is the purpose of this book to help fill that small space by exploring the difficult practice of that empirical research. And it is the purpose of this introduction to review how market exchange has been defined, to outline the commonest methods by means of which agricultural markets have been practically researched and to explain how each essay in this collection is located with reference to this body of theory and methods.
Barbara Harriss-White

Exchange

Frontmatter
2. Village Level Exchange: Lessons from South India
Abstract
The phrase exchange relations refers to the social relations between people as they trade in goods and services. This chapter describes the use of a survey to study exchange. Some specific techniques and analytical improvements for future research on agrarian markets are suggested. An exchange relations approach to the study of markets directs attention not only to the goods being exchanged but also to the people, families and institutions that are exchanging them. The exchanges scrutinised are not limited to sales, but can include gifts, sharing, barter, loans, and intrahousehold transfers. Exchange relations are often contrasted to production relations. The latter refer to the social relations between the providers and the buyers of human labour, while the former can refer to the exchange of many other products including foods, fertilisers, luxury goods, services, and even consumer credit. The exchange relations approach allows ‘labour’ to be treated in special ways instead of being labelled simply as one among many commodities.
Wendy Olsen
3. Social Stratification and Exchange in West African Conditions: A Participatory Approach to the Classification of Producers and Net Consumers of Marketed Surplus
Abstract
Indian empirical research on the marketed surplus has revealed significant differences in supply response, and in the quantity, timing, intermediary, physical site, and contractual forms of crop transactions according to agrarian class positions (see Sarkar, 1981, for North India; Nadkarni, 1980, for Central India; Bohle, 1985; Harriss et al., 1984 for South India). In the absence of any systematic data, the investigation of these properties of exchange in most African countries requires original field surveys. Furthermore, schemas of class based on, say, Indian conditions of land ownership, or labour relations and/or surplus appropriation, are not relevant to many African conditions, where land frontiers have not been reached, land ownership is rarely privatised and the division of labour in agricultural production and marketplace trade is primarily structured by gender (Meillassoux, 1981; Robson, Chapter 13 in this volume). A farmer may be male or female. Even where, as here, a farm household head is invariably male, the household may contain more than one farmer. Even a differentiating criterion such as ‘wealth’ is not a simple function of farm size. Rather, it is a conglomerate of several criteria. To discover a set of locally relevant wealth criteria prior to a socially disaggregated study of the marketed surplus and exchange relations, a participatory approach was used experimentally. In the account that follows, experience from fourteen villages of Atlantic Province, Benin is described.
Bernd Christiansen

Markets as Systems

Frontmatter
4. The Post-Harvest System in Indonesia
Abstract
This chapter describes the experience of a research programme on the private rice market in Indonesia — the Rice Marketing Study (RMS) — undertaken by a team of researchers between October 1989 and May 1991. The objective of the RMS was to improve understanding of the operation of the private rice market, and to draw implications from this for the current and potential future role of BULOG, the national Food Logistics Agency, responsible for stabilising the price of rice. The project is an example of policy-orientated, commissioned research.
Priscilla Magrath
5. Researching the Market System in Bangladesh
Abstract
This chapter describes the methods of a study1 of grain markets in Bangladesh, which set out to shed light on three concerns:
i
The character of exchange relations: how the terms and conditions of exchange vary amongst the main agrarian classes;
 
ii
Uneven commoditisation: the implications of uneven and changing levels of commercialisation for growth, vulnerability and equity; and
 
iii
Liberalisation: the implications of grain market liberalisation (undertaken during the 1970s and 1980s) for the operation of markets.
 
Ben Crow
6. Methods for Tracing Rapid Market Change: Urban Grain Supply Networks in Tanzania
Abstract
Underlying the current tidal wave of market liberalisation in the Second and Third Worlds is a belief in the ubiquity of entrepreneurial behaviour. Does a market in staple foodstuffs automatically blossom when state controls are removed? It is argued here that, in Tanzania, rather than having any spontaneous generation of entrepreneurial behaviour, Tanzanian grain markets are coalescing as physical impediments, and cultural, social and political institutions give way.
Deborah Fahy Bryceson

Price Performance and Market Efficiency

Frontmatter
7. Unstandardised Measures and the Analysis of Price Efficiency: An Application in Benin
Abstract
Price formation in periodic marketing systems where unstandardised volumetric measures are commonly used is vulnerable to various types of manipulation. The maize marketing system in the Atlantic Province, Republic of Benin is one such case where price formation involves two processes: the price per measure and the measurement technique. The plurality of measurement techniques means that the price per measure does not function as an indicator of scarcity. While the price per measure indicates the general price level, the ‘fine tuning’ of the final price takes place during the measurement process. In this chapter, practical means are introduced whereby the effect of the measurement technique on market performance may be analysed.
Bernd Christiansen
8. The Use of Hedonic Price Analysis in Agricultural Research: Market Prices and the Quality Characteristics of Beans in Colombia
Abstract
The common dry bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), a rich, primary source of protein, is produced and consumed in large quantities primarily in semi-tropical and tropical regions of the world (CLAT, 1991). It is of particular importance in Central and South America, where the traditional diet has for millennia been based on corn and beans. The supply of quality beans forms an important contribution to the welfare of the poor. As for most crops, research on beans has prioritised increases in production and improvements in disease resistance over quality improvement or reduction of post-harvest losses. However, acceptance of these HYVs by farmers has frequently been both low and slow.1
Luz Alicia Jiménez Portugal, Mathias von Oppen
9. Large Data Bases: The Nineteenth-Century English Corn Returns — ‘Not worth the paper that they are written on’?
Abstract
Historical studies of the marketing of agricultural produce in England have received renewed attention since the 1970s.1 One can see this as part of the wider interest in the modernisation of England with its implications for changes in the structure of society and its exchange relationships. Much of the historical work has been concentrated on the grain market, particularly that for wheat, and one can trace here several main lines of analytical attack.
Lucy Adrian
10. The Analysis of Price Integration: New Methodologies for Domestic Commodity Markets
Abstract
The concept of market price efficiency1 has been widely applied in domestic commodity markets (see Gilbert, 1969; Illori, 1968; Cummings, 1967; Lele, 1967, 1971; Jones, 1972, for example). This approach, given the number of the inferential dangers that it presents, because of their static specifications resulting in autocorrelated residuals and consequently in inefficient estimators, has been criticised strongly in the literature on market performance in rural areas by Blyn, 1973; Harriss, 1979; Heytens, 1986; Ravallion, 1983, 1986; and Timmer, 1984.
Theodosios Palaskas
11. Testing Market Integration: Some Critical Comments
Abstract
I have serious doubts as to whether any particular test can be an adequate measure of market efficiency. I have tried to recapitulate some reasons why different prices may relate to each other in different ways, without trying to be too dogmatic as to what is the right approach. Prices may cover different times, places and products. We should not be trying to relate one price to another without considering other prices that relate to cost of transfer from one state to another. The idea that the participants in the markets may be maximising their utility has implications for what may be an appropriate set of relationships among prices; but these implications may not be apparent until one looks at the markets for several products. Perhaps in the course of this discussion I shall veer away from a pure concept of ‘market integration’ towards a view of how prices in different markets should relate to each other.
George Jones

Markets and Institutions; Markets as Institutions

Frontmatter
12. Power in Peasant Markets
Abstract
Just as Molière’s would-be gentleman, Monsieur Jourdain, is delighted to discover from his lessons in literary criticism that he has been speaking prose all his life, so I find I have been studying power in markets. The objective of the original research in Punjab in 1971 was to study efficiency rather than power, but it has proved impossible to do field research on the former without doing it on the latter. These studies of power have arisen from an approach of theoretical scepticism. This chapter therefore begins by posing problems of definition, and summarising the problems of formal theory and the reasons for scepticism. It is then possible to describe the inductive approaches which have informed empirical work in the main body of the chapter. The fifth section is devoted to the field techniques I have used intermittently over a quarter century of fieldwork.
Barbara Harriss-White
13. Gender, Markets and Fieldwork in Developing Countries, with Special Reference to West Africa
Abstract
Feminist critiques, which have emerged in many disciplines of the social sciences, including geography, anthropology, sociology, development studies, and even economics (Folbré, 1994), grew out of concern for the neglect of women. The basis of a feminist critique is not the study of women, but rather the study of gender and the interrelationships between women and men. A feminist methodological approach analyses the role of gender in all human societies as a structuring principle shaping their economic and market systems, as well as their histories, geography, ideologies and political systems.
Elsbeth Robson
14. The Relevance of Religion and Culture to Commercial Accumulation: Fieldwork on Muslim Hausa Exchange and Agricultural Trade in Northern Nigeria
Abstract
During 1976, I began research in rural sociology while still a lecturer in contemporary history and social science at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, northern Nigeria. The intellectual source of my interest was the keen international debate in Marxist political economy concerning the causes of economic underdevelopment. But my personal reason for choosing rural sociology was my desire, after six years enjoying the company of city Nigerians, to experience life in the countryside, where most Nigerians lived. In economic anthropology, I had been greatly impressed by the empirical depth of Polly Hill’s study of inequalities in a Hausa-speaking village of northern Nigeria (Hill, 1972). In agricultural economics, I had read David Norman’s analysis of land and labour, and input-output, relationships in three villages near Zaria (Norman 1967, 1970, 1973). These studies left a gap in our knowledge of agricultural marketing in Hausaland. While Henry Hays had recently published his study of the ‘performance’ of grain marketing between Norman’s three villages and Zaria township, it used a methodology in agricultural economics based on large-scale random samples of farmers and each ‘marketing intermediary’ in the rural—urban link, and a questionaire technique (Hays, 1975). There was still room for participant observation of the social relationships linking Hausa farmers and traders to be gained from living in a village.
Paul Clough
15. The Black Box of the State: Studying the Politics of Food Distribution Policy
Abstract
This chapter is about research on state intervention in markets, and in particular the public food distribution system as it operates in India.1 The public food distribution system (PDS) dates from the Second World War. Although the system has changed in size, nature and coverage over the years, the most important objectives have been more or less stable since the 1960s. These are (a) to stabilise food prices; (b) to guarantee remunerative prices to foodgrain producers; and (c) to make foodgrains available to the vulnerable sections of the population. The system is, in fact, a rationing system. The government procures large quantities of foodgrains, mainly rice and wheat, keeps a buffer stock to be used in difficult circumstances, and distributes the grains on a more-or-less permanent basis to consumers/ration card holders. Although food distribution is under the aegis of central government, major differences exist between different Indian states, with regard to the quantities and prices of the distributed commodities, allocation to particular target groups, the efficiency of the system, and the modes of foodgrain procurement.
Jos Mooij
16. Epilogue: Best and Worst Practice, Surprises and Lessons
Abstract
In contrast to the spate of advocacy of ‘rapid’ rural field methods, contributors to this book, sadly, find no quick fix for fieldwork on markets. As Clough writes here (Ch. 14), the process of ‘entry into the mind of a trading system’ is a long one. Furthermore, virtually every fieldworker reported slippage in their timetable, whether that was planned to last six months or (as in several cases here) four years. Our accounts will serve one useful purpose if our experiences can be used as precedents for claims for larger contingency budgets than those funding research conventionally allow. It is as well to know in advance the likely sources of slippage: protocols and institutional clearance (which may take up to a year, in which other kinds of preparation must be planned); sickness (epidemics affecting respondents, crops and livestock as well as researchers); staff turnover and training replacements (in projects where paid field staff are used); and unexpected ‘freak’ weather conditions which preclude field-work and are exacerbated when poor people are forced by lack of alternative to colonise hazard-prone environments. Each of the last three could very reasonably require time increments of 10–40 per cent of the total time anticipated for field work, with corresponding additions to costs.
Barbara Harriss-White
Backmatter
Metadata
Title
Agricultural Markets from Theory to Practice
Editor
Barbara Harriss-White
Copyright Year
1999
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan UK
Electronic ISBN
978-1-349-27273-0
Print ISBN
978-1-349-27275-4
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27273-0