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The Elephant Is Jogging: New Pressures for Agricultural Reform in India. India's economy and agricultural sector have made remarkable progress in the 57 years since independence in 1947. Now, however, the agricultural sector has outgrown the policies that contributed to past success, as strengthening consumer demand, rising subsidies, and low agribusiness investment create pressure for policy reform.

India's Poultry Sector: Development and Prospects. Poultry meat is the fastest growing component of global meat demand, and India, the world's second largest developing country, is experiencing rapid growth in its poultry sector. In India, poultry sector growth is being driven by rising incomes and a rapidly expanding middle class, together with competitively priced domestic feed supplies and the emergence of vertically integrated poultry producers.

recommended readings
India's Edible Oil Sector: Imports Fill Rising Demand. India is the world's leading importer of edible oils and is likely to remain an important source of global import demand for the foreseeable future. Income and population growth, trade policy reforms, and domestic agricultural policies affecting the productivity of India's oilseed farmers and processing sector have contributed to increased consumption and import demand.

India's Pulse Sector: Results of Field Research. India has the world's largest pulse sector, but despite liberal import policies, imports have remained a small share of supplies and per capita consumption has declined. This report describes the market for crops such as chickpeas and lentils in that country and assesses the United States' competitive position as a supplier.

India’s Consumer and Producer Price Policies: Implications for Food Security. Rising retail grain prices (due to higher farm support prices) are the principal constraint to improving access to food by the poor, who spend roughly 80 percent of their income on food. Improving marketing efficiency and farm yields would allow retail food prices to fall without adversely affecting farmers.

India Relaxes Restraints on Agricultural Imports. Following an agreement negotiated under the World Trade Organization, India will replace its quantitative import restrictions with a system of tariffs and tariff-rate quotas by early 2001, providing trade access to all its commodity markets, including agricultural markets.

Trade Liberalization and the South Asian Economies: Adjusting to the Challenges of Globalization. South Asian countries have made significant strides in the past two decades in reforming economic policy, removing trade restrictions, and implementing Uruguay Round Agreement commitments, but further reform is needed to attain food security and improve economic growth in the region.

Food Security Assessment: International Agriculture and Trade Report. India is projected to meet minimum nutritional targets through 2009; while growth in grain output is expected to be less rapid than in the past, domestic food supplies will be sufficient as the population growth rate slows (page 17).

recommended data products
Production, Supply, and Distribution (PS&D) contains official USDA data on production, supply, and distribution of agricultural commodities for the United States and major importing and exporting countries. The database provides projections for the coming year and historical data for more than 200 countries and major crop, livestock, fishery, and forest products.

Foreign Agricultural Trade of the United States (FATUS) provides U.S. agricultural exports and imports, volume and value, by country, by commodity, and by calendar year, fiscal year, and month, for varying periods, such as 1935 to the present or 1989 to the present. Updated monthly or annually.

WTO Agricultural Trade Policy Commitments Database contains data on implementation of trade policy commitments by WTO member countries. Data on domestic support, export subsidies, and tariffs are organized for comparison across countries. This queriable database offers various options for viewing and downloading data.

Agricultural Market Access Database (AMAD) is a publicly available information tool for analyzing WTO market access issues in agriculture. It contains data and information on WTO member countries, including tariff schedules, tariff bindings, applied tariff rates, country notifications to the WTO, import quantities, and other data useful in tariff analysis.

related briefing rooms
World Trade Organization (WTO)
Agricultural baseline projections
U.S. agricultural trade

related links
Additional data and information on India are available from USDA, other U.S. government sources, international organizations, the Government of India, and research centers.

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