Journal of Agricultural Economics and Development
Year:2006 | Volume:14 | Issue:2 (54)|Papers Count:10

Smuggling is a multi-dimensional phenomenon and is affected by a wide range of factors, mainly tied to the national economical system and social, political and geographical condition of the country as well as some international factors.Despite its small share in household spending, tea consumption has continuously increased over the last several decades, with most of the demand being responded through unofficial import i.e. smuggling. Between 1997 and 2002 the share of smuggled tea in the national consumption has increased significantly from 44% to 66.7%. The drastic increase in import tariff for tea in 1989 from 3.24% to 84.46% did not serve to its goal which was supporting locally grown tea. Interestingly enough, smuggled tea in 2002 passed 89 thousand tons. This increase in the share of smuggled tea in national consumption has caused a series of problems for tea growers and causing some cultural, security and commercial negative effects.On the policy level, initiating reasonable tariffs seem to be the most effective. This study shows that any tariff above 25% will in fact fosters the smuggling for tea. On the other hand this change in the tariff will lower the importing cost of tea. As a result, local tea price and its quality should be carefully monitored and controlled simultaneously. This paper uses local and international (ITC) statistics to estimate the volume of tea export to the country in the period of 1997-2002 which lies in the third national development plan. In the end, some recommended policies and findings are presented which could be used to solve the existing problem in the tea sector.

Increasing the water use efficiency through promotion of sprinkler irrigation system has been one of the goals of the ministry of Jihad-e Agriculture in the past decade. Considerable amount of investment and efforts has been devoted to this end. In this regard, the study was conducted to find the effective factors on adoption of sprinkler irrigation in Nahavand Township. A stratified proportional sample of 330 farmers was interviewed including 133 and 197 adopters and no adopters, respectively. Content validity was achieved by a panel of experts in the field of agricultural extension, irrigation and agronomy. A pilot test was conducted to determine the reliability of the questionnaires. A Cronbachs' Alpha coefficient of 0.83 was achieved for the study. The findings indicate that the discriminate analysis developed based on this research is a suitable predictor of farmer’s adoption behavior. Application of results in this research regarding extension of sprinkler irrigation can increase the adoption rate as well as productivity of agricultural water.

The most important characteristics of Iranian economy are its dependence to the oil revenue. Therefore, fluctuations in oil prices can result in deficit in balance of payments. That is why non-oil exports must be promoted. In compliance with the promotion of non-oil exports and exclusion of an oil-dependent economy, agricultural goods stand out as appropriate commodities for export because they constitute a significant source of foreign currency for the country. In this research, the state of the agricultural export of Iran has been discussed, and then three important goods, saffron, pistachios and dates was examined in non-oil Iran commodity export over the past decades. To estimate the export supply function of above mentioned goods, Bond model and time-series approach were used in the period of 1991-2001.In this regard, the results show that price policies do not have positive effects on non-oil export revenue. Therefore, there should be alternative policies to increase the supply and diversification of agricultural goods.

Dates are major non-oil exportable agri-crops in Iran with an outstanding historical background. The country enjoys a reputation for its dates export at global level and has maintained a 1st or 2nd rank in dates export globally. This survey aims at identification and assessment the impacts of effective factors contributing in dates export development, using theoretical principles in export supply and demand with focus on economic analyzing techniques. Moreover, calculating the elasticity of effective factors on dates export supply and demand, specially the elasticity of price and income, role of relative prices, importing countries income, exchange rate, world dates production and the like in dates export have been examined in this analysis.To estimate the export supply and demand functions, simultaneous equation system and time-series statistics of 1971-2003 were adopted from the Ministries of Agriculture and Commerce. Later, by using the unit-root test and Phillips-Perron, an analysis ran on co integration of variables showing that the existing variables of the model are inter-related in long-term. The pattern of equations were revealed that in the export demand function, dummy variables as the width from the constant, relative price of dates for export, real exchange rate. The war dummy variables are all significant in effect. Besides, in the export supply function, certain variables as the width from the origin, export bulk, delayed export amount, local whole-sale price, local date’s production, delayed export value and the war dummy variable are of significant behavior and regarded as effective variables.Finally, the survey extended to calculate a short-run price elasticity for export demand equal to (-0.53) which is however, less than long-run price elasticity (-1.18). An estimate could also result in the value of 7.21 for short-run price elasticity in date export supply variable.

The purpose of this article is to give an estimation of Iran’s export potentials of agricultural products to 25 member countries of the European Union by using and applying appropriate methods of estimating trade potentials, comparative advantage and cosine index during 1999-2003.The study shows that many EU member countries have a great trade complementarily with Iran. An index value close to unity indicates the possibility of exporting much more to these countries. EU is a considerably big market for these products and would be accessible if EU’s import requirements are fully met.Out of 307 Iran’s exportable goods with comparative advantages, 63 counts for agricultural products. Iran currently exports only 7 items comprising of cucumber, pistachio, date, peach, hop-plant syrups pea and some vegetable raw materials used in dyeing or tanning industries.The agricultural products with the highest export potentials have been exported to 9 countries of Poland, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, England, France, Italy, Netherlands and Germany. The first place in importing these products from Iran belongs to Germany with more than 40 potential items. Providing tables by exporting agricultural products on a 6-digit HS basis, the article concludes that Iran has much more unutilized potentials in these export sectors that could be utilized as a basis to impose lower tariffs on these products and thus achieving a greater market access through well informed trade negotiations with the EU.

Massive amount of studies have been done to analyze farmers decisions considering the effect of risk. In these studies, different methods such as MOTAD, Target- MOTAD, - Separable linear programming, Mean variance, focus - loss, etc. have been used .In this research advanced-MOTAD and target-MOTAD have been used. The advanced-MOTAD model, in which the risk cost has been initiated as a time period function, is more suitable to Iran agricultural section.The used data are related to Arsanjan agricultural district from 1999 to 2004. The results state that as the risk coefficient parameter alters, the planting combination, while the gross profit and risk are invariable, alters too, corns and tomatoes are the products most affected by the change of the coefficient. The advanced MOTAD-Model provided farming pattern with less risk than target MOTAD model.

In the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in the concept of agricultural sustainability. Philosophical, theoretical and practical aspects, primarily environmental concerns, have been extensively developed in agronomic and economic forums. The important concern now is how to use sustainability as an operational criterion in the management of agricultural system.This paper presents a new modeling framework which uses quantified sustainability criteria in an optimization model. Fractional programming is presented as a tool for studying the sustainability of agricultural system. The essentials of the technique in both the single and the multi- objective cases are outlined.