Agricultural Exports in Selected Developing Countries: Their Potential for Financing Increased Food Imports

This chapter identifies some developing countries with good prospects for using agricultural exports to finance food imports on a continuing basis and examines the internal performance of these developing countries in relation to their export growth prospects. It discusses the potential gains from trade concessions in member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The individual country analysis of the possible trade-offs between allocating additional resources for domestic market production or export production is therefore of critical importance. Furthermore, agricultural exports constitute the major source of foreign exchange for many of the 28 countries included in this analysis. Agricultural exports are important to the economies of most food deficit countries. The extent to which countries will be able to capture export markets opened up by trade liberalization depends on their own past performance, which is in part a consequence of their past agriculture and trade policies.