The Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific and the Policy Assistance Division are pleased to express on behalf of FAO profound gratitude to the many senior officials of governments who collaborated with us in this work; to the authors of the national country studies and the resource persons and referees. We also take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Government of Republic of Korea which funded the Seoul Workshop. Among its own staff, FAO acknowledges the leading role played by the Policy Assistance Branch for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok, in particular Purushottam Mudbhary who organized and coordinated the preparation of country studies by the authors and inputs of resource persons and the workshop in Seoul, and Saifullah Syed, who launched the study and organized the first review workshop in Bangkok. Effective contributions from FAO headquarters involved many officers, and in particular Neela Gangadharan and Carlos Santana of the Policy Assistance Division.
The country studies in this volume are principally the work of national experts and their collaborators. The study for China was prepared by Jikun Huang, Director, and Jun Yang, Research Fellow, of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Scott Rozelle, Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California at Davis. The India study was prepared by Bibek Debroy, Secretary-General, PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and Laveesh Bhandari, Director, Indicus Analytics.
Individual country studies benefited from the comments and suggestions received from senior government officials and resource persons who participated in the workshops in Bangkok (June 2005) and Seoul (December 2005), as listed in Appendices 1 and 2 of Volume 1, and referees who reviewed the draft country studies. This distinguished group included Ammar Siamwalla (Thailand); Arsenio Balisacan (Philippines); V.S. Vyas, Y.K. Alagh, S.S. Acharya and Rajiv Mehta (India); Debapriya Bhattacharya (Bangladesh); and Hari K. Upadhyaya (Nepal). The FAO team in Rome (Neela Gangadharan and Carlos Santana) and Bangkok (Purushottam Mudbhary) and Randy Barker, consultant, provided comments and suggestions on various drafts. Robin Leslie provided editorial assistance in the preparation of this volume.
