Agricultural trade

Globalisation has transformed agriculture trade in fundamental ways. There is a rising share of high-value and processed food products and falling importance of bulky low-value items. At the same time, marketing channels have changed structurally, with larger and more concentrated sellers of final products and inputs involving multinational enterprises. With the growth in demand for processed products, globalisation has also resulted in a concentration in processing. Further, food services sectors and intellectual property issues have become important in agricultural trade. As these changes occur, developing countries have been beset with continuous fragmentation of land holdings, pitching smaller farmers against oligopsonistic buyer and oligopolistic sellers. However, because of changing demand for types of product and product attributes, as well as greater value addition, poor countries and smaller farmers have significant opportunities from globalisation. Exploiting these opportunities requires innovations that incorporate the comparative advantage of smaller countries and farmers and coordination to improve bargaining power.