If we must eat to survive, we must make agriculture sustainable. To make agriculture sustainable, we must consider the necessary strategic actions to understand the challenges in the sector, solve problems and innovate. That is why in July 2017, several Ministers and other senior representatives of the Ministries of Agriculture of Suriname, Guyana, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Belize, Barbados and The Bahamas participated in the Caribbean Agricultural Policy Forum organized by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The Forum analyzed the agricultural policy strategies of the different countries and their impact on the performance of the sector. It was an opportunity to discuss the challenges the Caribbean’s agricultural sector faces, including: the vulnerability of small producers to price volatility in the global market and of course the impacts of climate change. The dialogue was based on agricultural public policy data collected for each Caribbean country within the framework of the IDB’s Agrimonitor initiative. The following publication gathers the main findings and summarizes how agricultural policies affect producers and consumers as well as how the limited funding for agricultural services, such as research and infrastructure, could limit the ability of Caribbean farmers to compete effectively in global markets. The analyses presented are therefore meant to contribute to the Caribbean’s regional dialogue for the design of more effective agricultural policies, which we hope will strengthen the sector and improve the lives of people in the region.

This document is the result of a joint effort by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). In every chapter, ECLAC, FAO and IICA offer policy recommendations that they consider necessary to reinvigorate the region's agriculture. In the particular case of family farming, the report recommends a clear focus on the need to implement intersectoral policies that will retain new replacement generations and foster innovation and knowledge management. Moreover, instruments need to be developed by which these farms can successfully enter value chains.

The vast majority of the world's poorest households depend on farming for their livelihood. During the 1960s and 1970s, most developing countries imposed pro-urban and anti-agricultural policies, while many high-income countries restricted agricultural imports and subsidized their farmers. Both sets of policies inhibited economic growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Although progress has been made over the past two decades to reduce those policy biases, many trade- and welfare-reducing price distortions remain between agriculture and other sectors as well as within the agricultural sector of both rich and poor countries. Comprehensive empirical studies of the disarray in world agricultural markets first appeared approximately 20 years ago. Since then the OECD has provided estimates each year of market distortions in high-income countries, but there has been no comparable estimates for the world's developing countries. This volume is the second in a series (other volumes cover Africa, Asia, and Europe's transition economies) that not only fills that void for recent years but extends the estimates in a consistent and comparable way back in time and provides analytical narratives for scores of countries that shed light on the evolving nature and extent of policy interventions over the past half-century. 'Distortions to Agricultural Incentives in Latin America' provides an overview of the evolution of distortions to agricultural incentives caused by price and trade policies in the economies of South America, plus the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Together these countries constitute about 80 percent of the region's population, agricultural output, and overall GDP. Sectoral, trade, and exchange rate policies in the region have changed greatly since the 1950s, and there have been substantial reforms, especially in the 1980s. Nonetheless, numerous price distortions in this region remain, others have been added, and there have even been some policy reversals in recent years. The new empirical indicators in these country studies provide a strong evidence-based foundation for assessing the successes and failures of the past and for evaluating policy options for the years ahead.

As a result of the regional debt crisis, most governments of Latin America in the 1980s entered into a process of profound policy change, from an import substitution oriented strategy to a focus upon export-promotion, with an emphasis upon market liberalisation. According to mainstream economic theory, the effect of this shift would be to favour agriculture. This book, with contributors from Latin America and Europe, surveys the results on agriculture of a decade of policy change, and to produce new and unexpected insights.