Supply Equations Of Cereals For North Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria And South Africa

The need for this study stems from the problems of grain shortage in these parts of the world. The regions included in this study are: North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, United Arab Republic and Sudan), Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, and the Republic of South Africa. The North Africa region was chosen to conform with previous analysis which was done on the demand side in a project of the Department of Agricultural Economics of Michigan State University. Other countries were also included in order to make the analysis comparable to the demand study. The methodology was basically determined by the data available. Therefore, an analysis on existing time series data was undertaken. It is not the purpose here to examine specific policies, but rather to study the general principles and factors considered of primary importance in the supply of cereals. More specifically, the purposes of this study are: 1) to examine some important economic variables that affect the supply of cereals for these regions; and 2) to generate projections of cereals production based upon supply equations derived in the analysis. At this stage, however, the results of the analysis are not complete and may not provide sufficient background to establish policies, since the analysis is restricted to the supply and the data is crude. Furthermore, the fact that our projections (especially for North Africa and Nigeria) involve data collected during the Middle East and Civil wars respectively, suggests that these projections may be unduly affected by unusual events in the period of analysis.