As part of efforts geared towards strengthening Nigeria’s capacity for greater evidence-based policy processes by increasing the capacity of Nigerian researchers and analysts to undertake and make widely available relevant evidence, on December 14, 2016, Dr. Patrick Hatzenbuehler, an Associate Research Fellow based at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) Office in Abuja, gave a seminar presentation at Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria (Kaduna State). The seminar, entitled “production expectations and agricultural price formation in Nigeria” and was attended and well-received by over 60 participants including faculty members, researchers, and students at Ahmadu Bello University.
The speaker stressed that recent findings in price transmission literature show that food prices in urban and rural markets in Nigeria commonly achieve equilibrium, but with a long lag. These findings imply that other factors (e.g., weather) may also influence prices in intermittently isolated markets. The seminar presentation was based on research work that assumed that the degree to which food prices are formed by local conditions and prices in other markets vary within a crop year, but often under explainable circumstances such as during weather anomalies. Divergences from normal weather trends can influence production expectations, and, thus, also adjust intermarket price spreads and trade flows. Evidence of expectations effects resulting from weather anomalies on long-run price transmission was highlighted in the seminar presentation. However, the overall impact of weather on prices in the analyzed markets were generally small, implying that other non-weather factors such as transportation infrastructure, crop storage capacity, information networks, and other local market structure factors are also important for explanation of rural food price variation.
This seminar presentation was part of the activities in connection with the Feed the Future Nigeria Agricultural Policy Project, a joint effort between the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)’s Nigeria Strategy Support Program (NSSP) and Michigan State University funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID-Nigeria). Please see link below for further details about the Nigeria Agricultural Policy Project.
http://nssp.ifpri.info/files/2016/10/Final-NAPP-Pamphlet.pdf
