High risk is inherent to agriculture in Turkmenistan, a post-socialist desert country where the political uncertainties of transition exacerbate natural unpredictability. This study examines risk coping strategies of Turkmen farmers based on a survey of 1100 respondents carried out in 2002 in...

In many areas agriculture is exposed to weather related risks. Weather derivatives that get more and more in the focus of interest can reduce these risks. In this study we develop a temperature based weather derivative and analyse how it can reduce the weather-related energy cost risk in...

Markets for transferring catastrophic risk in agriculture are woefully lacking in developing countries. Even in developed countries, markets for transferring the risk of crop losses caused by natural hazards generally exist only with large government subsidies. However, such subsidies can be...

The paper considers the benefit to agricultural producers from commodity price insurance that provides in every year, but in advance of the resolution of production and price uncertainty, a minimum price for a fixed or variable portion of production. Under the assumption that producers do not...

A risk management model based on portfolio theory, which accounts jointly for price, quanitity, interest rate, and exchange rate risks, is developed and applied to cocoa and coffee production and exports in the Ivory Coast. Using commodity and financial futures marlets jointly, the results show...

Sudan's irrigated subsector is the largest in sub-Saharan Africa. Farming is practised under a scheme-mandated rotation with highly centralized decision making. Under this system, labour is the major input for which the tenant has allocation flexibility both during the season and across the...

The importance of the livestock sector to the economy of Uruguay can hardly be overstated. Livestock related exports averaged 83.7 percent of the country's total exports in the period 1967-1973 (Munoz Duran). In recent years, however, the country has faced a problem of a relatively slow rate of...

Government regulation of agricultural markets sometimes provides incentives that conflict with the government policy objectives. This paper is based on the 1984/85 grain market situation in Senegal. It discusses the potential impacts of regulatory uncertainty on activities of different market...

An uuportant question in the agncultural development hterature ts the relation between technology and production uncertainty. In tlus paper, a flexible, moment-based approach to production analysis 1s used to measure the technologtcal detenninants of production risk of Egyptian summer field...