Regional trade, food security and the role of government in food insecure countries: modelling governmental trade monitoring in Zambia and Zimbabwe
Nuppenau, E.A.
Agricultural Economics Analysis and Rural Development 5(1): 7-21
1995
Document Number: 242499
This paper shows the potential of an interactive regional trade model for the investigation of security concerns in regional trade. In its first part the paper focuses on the design of a programming model applied to regional trade between Zambia and Zimbabwe. In its second part the paper focuses on the presentation of results. It demonstrates, how the model results can be used to support contingent decision making of policy makers on trade volumes and national price policies in regional trade cooperation. Since basic foods are very sensitive to decisions on trade, a data base is provided that can assist policy makers to evaluate regional trade potentials and domestic concerns for food security, simultaneously. Furthermore, as the investigation shows, regional trade decisions in a food insecure environment are nevertheless dependent on prevalent world market prices. Since third country exports of the country that become specialized in producing export crops such as maize (in this case Zimbabwe) are dependent on the actual world market price, regional exports are affected by the trade opportunities on the world market as well as intra-regional trade opportunities.