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Agriculture in Korea is under increasing pressure to meet changing domestic demand, improve its productivity to keep up with the country's competitive manufacturing sector, and become more competitive at the international level. To date, the government has offered extensive support to farm income via price support, direct payments, preferential tax treatment, and reduced input prices. However, a more comprehensive policy approach is required to address the low-income problem in agriculture, and a more comprehensive rural development policy is also required to create employment opportunities for the younger generation.Korea should explore its potential to export niche agricultural products and processed food that reflect its rich and unique food culture. To unleash the sector’s potential, agricultural policy should focus on improving the productivity and sustainability of commercial enterprises and develop the food processing sector. The country's agricultural innovation system should become more integrated and collaborative, benefiting from its strong competitive advantage in Information and Communication Technology (ICT).

Recent mergers in the seed industry have led to concerns about market concentration and its potential effects on prices, product choice, and innovation. This study provides new and detailed empirical evidence on the degree of market concentration in seed and GM technology across a broad range of crops and countries, and analyses the causes and potential effects of concentration. It also explains how competition authorities have responded to mergers, and suggests policy options to help safeguard and stimulate competition and innovation in plant breeding by avoiding unnecessary regulatory barriers, by facilitating access to genetic resources and intellectual property, as well as by stimulating public and private R&D. As this study shows, policy makers have several levers besides competition policy to ensure an innovative and competitive seed industry.

This book presents an in depth analysis of the contribution of services to the Australian economy, the regulatory environment of the services sector and its performance in an international context. The analysis highlights the importance of co-ordinated domestic policy action, priorities for promoting behind-the-border regulatory reforms in strategic international markets, and the benefits of an ambitious bilateral, plurilateral and multilateral trade policy agenda that contributes to rules-based certainty and predictability in services trade globally.

This report, prepared by FAO and the OECD with inputs from IFPRI, IFAD, the World Bank and WTO, has been submitted to the G20 Presidency of the Argentine Republic in response to the Presidency’s request for information on future trends and challenges faced by global agriculture, with a special focus on the role of soils in promoting food security and the measures that could be undertaken to facilitate sustainable soil management.

This report examines how public stockholding policies related to rice in Asia can influence domestic and international markets. Following a review of the working of rice public stockholding programmes in eight Asian countries (Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Thailand), the report examines the impacts of these programmes over the medium term (2018-2030) and analyses how these impacts would change should the selected countries collectively set their public stocks to either a low or high level. Results show that the strongest impacts would occur during the three-year transition period when countries adjust their public stocks to the new levels, but that there would also be structural impacts over the medium term, although at a lower intensity, on procurement, domestic and international prices, availability, private stock levels, and public expenditure. In the event of a global production shock, the model projects that the immediate impact on prices and availability would be less severe under the high public stock scenario, but that recovery would be faster and public expenditure lower when countries hold smaller public stocks.

The expansion of agricultural production in China has been remarkable, but at the expense of the sustainable use of its natural resources. To counter this, as well as to face problems due to rising labour costs and a rapidly ageing rural population, agricultural production must concentrate on a smaller number of more productive farms. It is in this light that this report reviews recent policy developments to assess whether they have been conducive to productivity growth and environmental sustainability. It finds that the conditions for structural change and innovation at the farm level in China could be further improved by securing the long-term stability of land rights as well as reducing transaction costs. Greater policy coherence with agri-environmental policy objectives could also be achieved through stricter enforcement of environmental regulations. Finally, the agricultural innovation system could play a greater role by placing the focus on public agricultural R&D in areas such as the environment and resource conservation, and in other areas which do not attract much private sector investment.