Cash crops

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Cash crops (English for "cash crops") is a term from agricultural economics that is not used uniformly in the literature. Possible German designations are, depending on the definition, "export fruits" or "market fruits". The opposite are food crops .

Definitions

There are at least four different definitions according to which the term cash crops refers to the following products of crop , animal and forestry production:

  • all surpluses that are marketed
  • all products except staple foods
  • agricultural products other than food
  • agricultural products exported are

In summary, Cash Crops stands for products from agriculture, for example bananas or coffee, which were only produced for the market and do not serve the self-sufficiency of the farmers and the country. These are also referred to as "crops intended for sale" or "export crops".

Effects

In their 1989 paper, Simon Maxwell and Adrian Fernando identified a controversial debate about the impact of cash crops on growth, distribution, food security, dependency and the environment.

Economic growth

By 1989 there were very few case studies with varying results on the impact of cash crops on economic growth.

Poverty and income

At the time of publication by Maxwell and Fernando (1989), the prevailing view was that cash crops have negative distributive effects. However, a growing number of case studies showed that cash crops can benefit poor households, either directly or through the labor market. In Tanzania , most of the farmers who managed to overcome poverty were those who diversified their agriculture and grew cash crops (vegetables, fruit, vanilla ) and kept livestock in addition to food for their own consumption . Poverty tended to persist in more traditional systems. In Uganda , poverty alleviation has been linked to improved productivity and diversification into commercial crops. In Malawi, smallholders produce 70% of the - mainly exported - tobacco , which has enabled them to advance socio-economically. In Vietnam , the liberalization of the agricultural markets led to a greater market orientation of small farmers, as a result of which their poverty rate fell drastically and their incomes rose significantly.

Food security

Critics like Food First consider growing cash crops to be a food security threat. According to Moore Lappé and Collins (1977), poor people can no longer be fed when developing countries export their food production. Maxwell and Fernando consider this line of reasoning a dangerous oversimplification. Per Pinstrup-Andersen (1983) criticizes those who see a solution to the hunger problem in the substitution of cash crops with staple foods, since this approach ignores the potential benefits of trade and the possibilities of different groups to obtain food. Von Braun and Kennedy (1986) did not find any evidence of a trade-off between cash crops and staple foods in a literature analysis; most countries either grow both or neither.

At the household level, von Braun and Kennedy (1986) do not provide a clear picture of the effects of cash crops on nutrition. Models like that of Fafchamps (1992) suggest that smallholders will only increasingly switch to cash crops when there is a stable price for buying food - for example through adequate transport infrastructure / market integration. Food safety is a prerequisite here for smallholders to grow cash crops .

Dependency

Cash crops can reinforce existing dependencies and create new ones. For example, coffee producers can depend on the demand behavior of consumers in rich countries and suffer from crises, for example. According to Susan George (1985), cash crops threaten a dependency on the marketing of these cash crops by multinational corporations and a dependency on the supply of food by rich countries. According to UNCTAD , in 1980 three of the six largest multinationals controlled 85–90% of the coffee, 85% of the cocoa and 70–75% of the banana trade. A recent analysis of smallholder cocoa production in Indonesia showed that local producer prices are indeed closely correlated with world market prices. On average, however, the smallholders earned (high) 70.2% of world market prices. Maxwell and Fernando (1989) consider it an exaggeration that farmers lose control of their production decisions by creating cash crops for the world market.

environment

According to Maxwell and Fernando (1989), there is no evidence that export-oriented agricultural production is more polluting than commercial food production for household consumption.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Simon Maxwell, Adrian Fernando: Cash crops in developing countries: The issues, the facts, the policies. In: World Development. Volume 17, No. 11, November 1989, pp. 1677-1708.
  2. ^ Joachim De Weerdt: Moving out of Poverty in Tanzania's Kagera Region. (PDF; 448 kB). Economic Development Initiatives, Bukoba, Tanzania 2006.
  3. ↑ Anirudh Krishna, Daniel Lumonya, Milissa Markiewicz, Firminus Mugumya, Agatha Kafuko, Jonah Wegoye: Escaping Poverty and Becoming Poor in 36 Villages of Central and Western Uganda. ( Memento of November 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 181 kB). In: Journal of Development Studies. 2006, 42, pp. 346-370.
  4. ↑ World Bank: World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development. (PDF; 7.2 MB) 2007, p. 73.
  5. ^ Marcel Fafchamps: Cash Crop Production, Food Price Volatility, and Rural Market Integration in the Third World. In: American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Volume 74, No. 1, February, 1992, pp. 90-99.
  6. ↑ J. Juhrbandt, T. Duwe, J. Barkmann, G. Gerold, R. Marggraf: Structure and management of cocoa agroforestry systems in Central Sulawesi gradient across to intensification. In: T. Tscharntke, C. Leuschner, E. Veldkamp, ​​H. Faust, E. Guhardja, A. Bidin (Eds.): Tropical Rainforests and Agroforests under Global Change - Ecological and Socio-economic Valuations. Springer, Heidelberg et al. 2010, pp. 115-140.