Timor-Leste

This paper includes the following points: agribusiness partnerships and you; when you negotiate to work with an investor; find out about your agribusiness investor before... Show More + making a partnership; who should talk to the investor about an agreement?; Understanding the commercial arrangements; learning what to do and communicating with the investor; whose land will be used for the project?; Risk management or why i shouldn't put all my eggs in one basket; what if I have a disagreement with the investor?; and how do you manage the benefits from an agribusiness partnership? Show Less -

As in other societies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, customary social organization features strongly in rural Timor-Leste. As well as providing avenues for conflict... Show More + resolution, the influence of customary systems extends to land tenure. As the state, development partners, private investors, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others seek to promote rural development in Timor-Leste, they will be forced to engage in some way with customary ownership and use claims which prevail in the districts. A further dimension of the subsistence nature of the Timor-Leste economy is the fact that the use of contracts in connection with agribusiness transactions is rare. This presents a further challenge to the objective of increasing private sector investment in the rural economy. Based on field visits, this Justice for the Poor (J4P) briefing note looks at the rural economy of Timor-Leste and considers approaches that could help promote productive and equitable relationships between communities and other rural development partners and contribute to mutually beneficial rural development outcomes. Show Less -

Despite its importance as East Timor's major export, coffee remains relatively unresearched in terms of the characteristics of the sector's production and intermediation... Show More + process. If coffee production is to be promoted (as most analysts suggest, since it appears that coffee is a product in which the country has comparative advantage) more needs to be known about the sector and the farmers whose livelihood depends on it, at least partially; that was the objective of this study. The project was designed to cover two distinct areas of research - literature review and field study. The questionnaire had two main areas of focus. The first was to get information about coffee farmers in terms of household structure, levels of coffee production by type of coffee, sales by level of processing (cherries versus dried coffee), prices received for coffee sold, time spent on coffee production and other activities and relative dependence on coffee as opposed to other sources of income. Questions also were asked about land ownership and about the year-end levels of stocks, desired and actual, and household storage capacity. Data was requested for the past three years so as to gauge the effect of the 1999 disturbances, at least insofar as they affected farmers currently on the land. The second set of questions was meant to yield information regarding possible policy options. Questions had to do with the motivations for farmers' effort or lack thereof, their opinion regarding the age of the trees and the benefits of replanting and pruning, their attitudes to sharing facilities and participating in communal structures, the types of common facilities that they considered would be most useful, and their view on what were the main impediments to increased output. The questionnaire was responded to by a total of about 1000 households with 727 sets of responses being deemed as statistically acceptable. The geographic distribution was based on the relative share of the major coffee-producing regions in total recorded production in 1997. Show Less -