Agricultural marketing and price policies

This volume on Agricultural Marketing and Price Policies is a sequel to an earlier book by Drs. Kahlon and Tyagi on "Agricultural Price Policy in India". This book was very well received in India and abroad with a suggestion from professional friends that although the book contained adequate material on these aspects of market structure which would make price policy effective, a special treatment of marketing policies will fill the gap that exists in the existing literatures concentrating more on agricultural commodity markets than on agricultural policies.

The development of efficient and development oriented agricultural marketing system in developing countries depends to a large extent upon Government policies and services. Marketing services are of particular importance in developing countries since the predominant small scale enterprises are unable to organise these services effectively themselves. For these reasons market development role of the Government is carefully distinguished from its regulatory and market intervention role.

The present book is designed to largely meet this need. The authors, however, felt that marketing policies could not be completely divorced from pricing policies and this volume, therefore, deals with both--Part 1 with marketing policies and Part II with the lessons learned from the operations of agricultural price policies in the seventies and the reorientation in the focus of these policies in the eighties.