Food Policy Reforms in Central Asia: Setting the Research Priorities

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Babu, Suresh Chandra Tashmatov, Alisher
Copyright Year	2000
Abstract	Achieving food and nutrition security is at the forefront of the development objectives of the Central Asian Republics—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Since independence, the countries of the Central Asia region have undergone a series of transitions from centrally planned economies to market-orient ated systems. Despite great efforts by these countries and external advice of international and bilateral agencies, policy reform has been frustratingly slow, and food insecurity and malnutrition remain at a high level. Unless efforts are made to jumpstart their economies, the Central Asian countries may face increased poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition, the social and political costs of which could be enormous. One major constraint to deeper economic reform has been the lack of information on the impact of alternative policy options. Reforms continue to be externally designed without adequate policy analysis and without local ownership. This unfortunate situation is further compounded by several factors. First, the countries of Central Asia have not fully developed the institutional and human capacity for formulating and implementing policies in the short time since independence. Second, external advisers seem to have largely ignored political economy issues in designing and executing the policy reform packages. Third, fearing social unrest, the governments have taken a cautious approach to policy reforms. Fourth, policy reforms have lost their priority on the governments’ development agendas, which are now focused on preventing further deterioration of living conditions. And finally, the basic macroeconomic framework fundamental to the success of sectoral policy reforms is largely missing in some of the Central Asian countries. Generating momentum to reorient the nature, approach, and sequence of policy reform packages will require rethinking the policy reform process. Involving the local policy research community in identifying critical issues and challenges, setting priorities among them for food, agriculture, and natural resource policy research, and implementing joint research studies is the best way to build local capacity and to increase the ownership of policy package design and implementation. However, the analytical capacity is not well developed, and solid policy information remains scarce in this region.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/16245/1/ca000001.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article