فصلنامه اقتصاد کشاورزی و توسعه
پیاپی 108 (زمستان 1398)

Given the importance of pursuing a policy of free-market prices in bread and flour markets within Iran’s subsidies reform, this study aimed at recognizing and prioritizing the most important factors affecting the bread and flour prices under such an assumed situation using AHP and FAHP methods and comparing the results. The required data were gathered in 2013 through questionnaires and interviews with seven experts who had been active in government offices as well as the bread and flour producers. Unlike the FAHP results, the AHP results were proven to be valid. Furthermore, the AHP results indicated that the most important contributing factors of flour prices would be domestic wheat prices, international wheat prices plus export volume, respectively; in addition, bread prices would be influenced firstly by flour prices and then by wages and fuel costs, respectively. Therefore, since following the implementation of free-market price policy in bread and flour markets, the bread prices might be significantly influenced by the wheat ‎prices, it would be inevitable to build up a stable wheat market through a market regulation mechanism and to make a careful reconsideration ‎of wheat guaranteed prices in this respect. ‎

This study aimed at investigating the raw milk distribution channels and the factors affecting the channel choice to improve the effectiveness of the marketing system in Dairy Supply Chain in Kerman County of Iran. For this purpose, a simple random sample of 200 dairy farmers was collected, and respective questionnaires were completed. Then, the effective factors were determined by the use of multinomial logit model. The study results showed that in the first and third marketing channels, the product was led to milk factory while in the second and fourth marketing channels; it was delivered to the final consumer. In addition, the findings showed that change in payments caused the farmers trust local raw milk purchasers in the county more than the intermediaries while with milk prices rising, livestock breeders preferred them to sell their products; also, by increasing milk production, they preferred mediator elimination and by increasing the distance to the sales center, the likelihood of milk transfer to the plant increased. In this regard, it was recommended that dairy plant managers would monitor the purchase price from the breeders as well as gain their satisfaction and trust, especially by cash payments.

The cotton as a strategic crop has the important role in creating job, foreign currency and increasing income in agricultural sector and related industries which has been considered by government. In the last couple of decades, the cotton cultivation area in Gorgan County which is one of the major cotton-producing regions has decreased considerably duo to high costs of production and continuation of import. Therefor the object of this study is mainly concentrate on assessing the influence of cultivation and profitability of cotton in Gorgan County influenced by government supportive policies using PMP. The data has been collected by filling out 295 questionnaires using the stratified random sampling method from farmers of Gorgan County in 2014-2015. Three cropping systems of cotton are considered in this study, including: mono-cropping, double cropping and intercropping systems and the governments supportive policies are measured in three parts such as cotton pricing policy, cotton production input subsidy policy and direct payment to cotton production policy. The result shows that the cotton production inputs subsidy has positive profitability among different government supportive policies, so that the most profitable one is related to the cotton mechanic harvesting policy with 1.78 percent of the change. According to results, it is recommended to increase cotton cultivation in Gorgan by applying production inputs subsidy.

Over the past three decades, due to population growth, economic growth and energy consumption, environmental hazards have increased. Iran is a growing country and one of the examples of growth patterns with pressure on natural resources. Therefore, it is very important to study the environmental impacts of natural resources consumption and development in Iran. This study aimed at optimizing the agricultural policies with the orientation of environment conservation and improved economic productivity through building a two-level multi-objective optimization model as well as evaluating the optimal set of solutions obtained from two policy tools of 'increase in price of inputs' and 'introduction of taxes on fertilizer consumption'. This research was conducted as a case study in agricultural sector of Khomein Plain in Iran and during the 2015-2016 cropping year. The 'Pareto-optimal' set of answers obtained from the evaluation of the concerned policies showed that cultivars including beans and onions resulted in higher yields and lower fertilizer consumption than the other optimal cultivar patterns. Also, changing the cropping pattern to the proposed products would lead to an increase in water use productivity by 162 percent and a 29 percent reduction in the average consumed fertilizer while reducing the soil erosion by 33 percent. Given the study results, the bean and onion products are recommended to be used in the composition of farmers' cultivation pattern.

Over recent years, agricultural sector of Urmia Lake Basin has been in crisis and due to its impact on Iran's food supply, it is essential to formulate a plan to stabilize the agricultural sector in this region. This study aimed at presenting a strategic plan for sustainable development of the agricultural sector in the Urmia Lake Basin through SWOT method using matrix of QSPM. The study results indicated that the main strategy for developing agricultural sector in this region was a defensive strategy; in addition, the priority to implement its sustainable development programs included management of agricultural water consumption, development of mechanization in the agricultural sector, integration of agricultural lands and their integrated management, and promoting the literacy and knowledge of the human resources employed in the agricultural sector, respectively. Sustainable agriculture is the only rationale way out of the crisis.

This study aimed at investigating the relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation in agricultural sector among provinces of Iran. Thus, the value added generated by the agricultural sector was utilized as the index of economic growth and Carbon Dioxide emission from the agricultural sector as the environmental degradation index; then, a panel data of 24 provinces of the country over 1990 to 2014 was obtained from statistical center of Iran. The panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) model was employed to study the causal relationship between variables of the model; also, the panel autoregressive distributed lag (Panel ARDL) was used for estimating the model. Empirical results of the study revealed that there was a unidirectional relationship from agricultural value added and energy consumption intensity to agricultural Carbon Dioxide emission. In addition, the relationship between agricultural Carbon Dioxide emission and the agricultural growth was found N-shaped and statistically significant. Moreover, the results indicated that a relative increase in agricultural energy consumption intensity positively affected the Carbon Dioxide emission. As a result, future policies in the agricultural sector should involve appropriate plans for the conservation of environmental and natural resource of the country.

Legumes, as the second most important source of food after grains, account for 770,000 hectares of annual crops cultivation area in Iran. About 61.3 percent of the legumes cultivation area was allocated to the pea production, some 97.7 percent of which included the rainfed legumes. Given the high contribution of rainfed cultivation, it is expected that climate change will have a major impact on the yield of pea. So, this study aimed at investigating the effect of climate change on the probability of deciding to cultivate pea product and its yield using the spatial Heckman model. The model was estimated by using agronomic data of pea and meteorological and geographical information of 336 counties of the country during 2012-2013. According to the study findings, spatial contiguity, human influence index and wind speed affected the probability of deciding to cultivate the pea plant, and the spatial contiguity, wind speed, precipitation and irrigation were the most important factors affecting the pea yield. Therefore, production of drought resistant varieties of chickpea as well as more attention to the management of water resources and application of efficient water storage methods in the production areas of this product such as Kermanshah, Lorestan, Kordestan and West Azarbayjan provinces were recommended.

One of the most difficult duties for public decision-makers is to select a practical and legal instrument to receive water tariffs in the agricultural water pricing policies. This study aimed at analyzing the potential consequences of different instruments for irrigation water pricing (area, volumetric and two-part tariff) and their effects on the sustainability of irrigated lands with respect to economic, social and environmental impacts. For this purpose, farmers’ behavior in response to pricing instruments was simulated through positive mathematical programming and the composite indicators were calculated for sustainability measurement of different instruments in these irrigation water pricing policies using Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP). The required data were collected in two-stage cluster sampling by 120 questionnaires completed from farmers under the irrigation network of Qazvin Plain in Iran as well as opinions and experiences of experts and documentary data. The results showed that the implementation of the studied irrigation water pricing policy instruments had negative impacts on economic sustainability indicator (i.e. profitability) and social sustainability indicator (i.e. employment) and a positive impact only on environmental sustainability indicators; and water consumption increased in area pricing and decreased in volumetric and two-part tariff pricing. In addition, the overall sustainability index in two-part tariff was higher than other water pricing instruments. Therefore, a two-part tariff pricing policy and adoption of alternative policies to achieve complete sustainability and compensate for the negative effects of this pricing policy were recommended.

Since the share of agricultural sector's employment in rural areas is more than those of services and industry sectors, identifying and explaining the relationship between production gap of agricultural sector and inflation in rural areas can contribute to the economic decisions in these areas. Therefore, this study aimed at estimating the production gap of agricultural sector and its impact on inflation rate in rural areas of Iran during 1986-2013 in neoclassical Phillips curve perspective. For this purpose, Auto Regressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) method was used. The results showed that the neutral money and rational expectations theories of Lucas were unacceptable for the rural areas of Iran. In other words, the impact of monetary policies on inflation, employment and production gap in these areas was positive in both short and long terms; in addition, the Phillips curve in these areas was significantly descending in either short or long terms, indicating a negative relationship between inflation and unemployment in the rural areas of Iran but a positive relationship between inflation and production gap in these areas. The study results indicated that the inflation in rural areas was not simply a monetary phenomenon and it was also affected by the real variable of production gap of agricultural sector. So, in addition to the monetary policies, the actual sectors should be considered in inflation control of rural areas.

Transportation is a field of service with a significant role in the cycle of all goods and services from production to consumption. This is especially true for perishable goods like poultry meat, the distribution of which becomes even more important for major cities. The purpose of this study was to design a model for heterogeneous multi-depot transport fleet routing with due consideration of the limited time window (FSMTW) in the form of patterns mixed integer linear programming (MILP). For this purpose, the model was designed according to the daily demand of poultry markets of Tehran Municipality in 2013. Routing pattern was examined for three different days. The results showed that the model designed could significantly reduce transportation costs, so that it reduced costs for three studied testing days by 29.56, 27.91 and 32.58 percent (i.e. 16698, 14596 and 14116 thousand IR rials), respectively, compared to the existing transportation conditions. Therefore, it was suggested that Tehran Municipality use the system for registering and distribution of the demand as well as using the designed models for the distribution of poultry meat to reduce the logistics costs.