The dilemma of cheap food and self-sufficiency: The case of wheat in Iran

A Comparative Analysis on Food Security in Bangladesh, India and Myanmar

“…This study adopted the food self-sufficiency ratio, a commonly used indicator to measure the food security at national level [28][29][30][31][32][33][34]. This ratio is defined as the share of domestic food grain production in the total domestic consumption [35], and is called the food security index (FSI) in this study.…”

The role of pasture management for sustainable livestock production in semi-arid subtropical mountain regions

“…Most underlying research, however, has focused on ecosystems dominated by herbaceous vegetation, such as those in Africa, Australia and the United States, while only little work has so far been done to address the applicability of these concepts to shrubland ecosystems of the highlands in the Middle East and Northern Africa, such as the Atlas mountains in Morocco, the Asir and Hijaz mountains in Saudi Arabia, the southern Zagros mountains in Iran as well as the highlands of Ethiopia, Oman and Yemen. Agricultural production in these countries is largely constrained by scarce and variable rainfall, and due to rapid population growth and increasing meat consumption, they increasingly rely on the import of staple foods, meat and meat products as well as animal feed (Amid, 2007;Sarris, 2000). In the context of raising import prices for all these commodities, the improvement of livestock production in traditional systems, which is commonly criticized for its low productivity (Hamadeh et al, 2001;Thomas et al, 2002;Zaibet et al, 2004) and strongly relies on the natural shrublands as fodder resources, has consequently become an important task.…”

The Evolution of Food as Social Assistance: An Overview

“…For example, fiscal subsidies to consumers allowed Egypt to relax procurement quotas (Von Braun and de Haen 1983) and enabled Morocco to support wheat producers without imposing major increases on consumer prices (Azzam 1991;World Bank 2003). A similar wedge permitted the Islamic Republic of Iran to pursue a self-sufficiency strategy with price incentives for producers as well as controlled prices for bread (Amid 2007). Additionally, before implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mexico simultaneously offered prices to producers that were above world market prices and provided subsidized tortillas to urban consumers.…”