TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gilbert, Christopher L
AU  - Varangis, Panos
TI  - Globalization and International Commodity Trade with Specific Reference to the West African Cocoa Producers
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 9668
PY  - 2003
Y2  - May 2003
DO  - 10.3386/w9668
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9668
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w9668.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Panos Varangis
M1  - published as Christopher Gilbert, Panos Varangis. "Globalization and International Commodity Trade with Specific Reference to the West African Cocoa Producers ," in Robert E. Baldwin and L. Alan Winters, editors, "Challenges to Globalization: Analyzing the Economics" University of Chicago Press (2004)

AB  - Liberalization of tropical agricultural markets has brought globalization, in the sense that all producers now face world rather than domestic prices. Producer prices have tended to rise as a share of fob prices as intermediation costs and tax has declined. However, in conjunction with inelastic demand, the downward shift of the aggregate supply curve results in lower world prices. Farmers therefore get a higher share of a lower price. Cocoa is the market where these changes have been most pronounced. The incidence of the liberalization benefits in cocoa is largely on developed country consumers at the expense of the governments of the exporting countries and farmers in non-liberalizing (non-African) countries. Farmers in liberalized African markets are broadly neither better nor worse off.
ER  -