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It is the domestic price that shows the influence of agricultural policy in the countries whose governments intervene the agricultural markets. Thus, the Nominal Rate of Protection (NRP), a price difference between domestic and international price divided by the international price is often used as an indicator for the level of agricultural protection. The purpose of this chapter is to examine factors to affect the agricultural protection level in Africa by using the data from 1961 to 2010 for 20 African countries. As shown in the past studies, it is generally observed that agricultural protection levels are different between in developing and developed countries. Agriculture is taxed in the early stages of development with lower domestic prices than international prices. But, as the economy develops, agriculture tends to be protected with their prices higher than international prices. This trend is also observed in African countries. However, in comparison to East Asian countries that have been rapidly industrialized, the level of agricultural protection in Africa remains low. In this paper, a theoretical model is presented to explain the mechanism of the growth of agricultural protection level and then a statistical analysis is conducted to test the hypothesis in the model. The results showed that all the variables are statistically significant with expected signs. The determinants of agricultural protection level supposed in the model are effective. While Africa as a whole is still in the process of economic development and the average agricultural nominal rate of protection is not so high, it is assumed that it would experience higher level of agricultural protection if it is developed rapidly. Avoiding market intervention and correcting distortions of farmer’s incentives are necessary even if correcting income disparity is a political priority in Africa. So-called decoupled policies such as direct payments with public investment in agricultural infrastructure should be introduced to promote agricultural growth.

The community has been used as a convenient institutional device for the mobilization of rural labor for successful irrigation management. The main message of this chapter is that the use of community is not a panacea, and government should also play an important role particularly in emerging states. An important issue in irrigation management in emerging states is how to achieve a smooth substitution of capital for labor under increasing labor scarcity in the agricultural sector. The community cannot properly achieve this substitution because externalities in irrigation services increase in a complicated manner when farmers exit from farming, and community mechanisms also decline. Lessons from Japan, China, and India are summarized threefold. First, as the externalities increase, the government should actively intervene at the right time to support the adoption of labor-saving technologies in irrigation management. Second, at the same time, however, we need to have some mechanism which can circumvent a political economy problem of excessive support following the trend for increasing agricultural protectionism during rapid industrialization. The experiences of the developed countries exemplify the difficulty of this task. Third, the government must take care of new issues which also need active government involvement: the depletion of groundwater and the introduction of volumetric irrigation water pricing. Since these new issues were not common among the DCs when they were at the similar stage of economic development, the governments of the contemporary emerging states need more administrative capacity than the governments of the DSs used to do for irrigation management.