Adam John

Background
The international community and national agricultural research systems (NARS) recognize the importance of supporting smallholders in order to reduce poverty and promote the food security status of some of the most vulnerable groups in the world. South Asia has the largest food-insecure population in the world, and in several farming systems in the region, rice is the most important staple crop. This study examined the extent to which agricultural research has prioritized the greatest factors that constrain smallholder productivity in those farming systems. It also explored the degree to which research has connected production constraints and environmental challenges faced by rice smallholders.

Results
Estimated congruency ratios suggested that peer-reviewed research has been heavily skewed towards abiotic production constraints. Meanwhile, socio-economic production constraints had received relatively little attention from the research community, even though socio-economic constraints account for more than 22% of rice yield losses in the South Asian farming systems examined. Furthermore, although research publications have tended to concentrate on the most important rice production constraints and linked those constraints to challenges identified by environmental disciplines, there are many medium and small production constraints which have received little research attention. This is despite the fact that the sum of these less severe constraints represents the largest contribution to total rice yield losses.

Conclusions
While national and international research bodies are well aware of the challenges smallholders face, there seems to be a lack of coordination in setting research priorities, since there are many areas, particularly in the social sciences field, which are not receiving the research attention that they warrant, when compared to the opportunity improvements in this sector could provide—as demonstrated in this study. This suggests that steps need to be taken in providing the research community with incentives and support in understanding these ‘needs’ to increase the impact of their research. Increasing the level of accountability of research institutions to smallholders’ and rural populations’ needs and promoting participatory farmer-focused research may help in improving research coordination and improving livelihoods by reducing poverty.

International rice markets are seen as volatile due to the thin nature of the market which is believed to be exacerbated by a low level of substitution between major rice export markets. In other words, this perceived lack of price transmission amongst international rice markets is believed to further thin out an already thin world rice market. The paper tests for price transmission between five major rice exporting markets representing Asia and the Americas over the past decade. It uses a vector autoregressive framework and performs Granger and Toda-Yamamoto causality tests and generalized impulse response functions to interpret the model’s results. The findings suggest that price transmission exists across these major rice export markets with price relations being the most widespread between Asian markets. Furthermore, the direction of price transmission suggests that Asian prices act as price leaders for North and South American prices. While it is not clear whether there is a price leader amongst the Asian export markets, Vietnam has the most extensive price relations with other export markets which would suggest that the Vietnamese rice export price is a more suitable world reference price than the Thai export price. An implication of the presence of price relations between rice export markets is that the world rice market is not as fragmented as generally perceived in the literature. However, it can also explain why international rice prices are so sensitive to the volatile trading behavior of major markets.

This was presented as a Brown Bag Lunch presentation at the Agricultural and Food Policy Studies Institute at Universiti Putra Malaysia on 14th November with the aim of sharing some insights into the research environment of one of the world's most respected environmental think tanks with post graduates and staff at UPM

This presentation was presented as part of the Natural Resources Institute Seminar Series in 2014. This presentation was also presented at the International Rice Congress in Bangkok in October 2014. It presents the findings of a journal article which is published in Agriculture and Food Security. Click on the link to watch the presentation.