| Abstract | Trade policy reforms which lead to changes in world prices of agricultural commodities or  domestic policies aimed at affecting agricultural prices are often seen as causing a policy  dilemma: a fall in agricultural prices benefits poor urban consumers but hurts poor rural  producers, while a rise yields the converse. Poor countries have argued that they need to be  able to use import protection and/or price support policies to protect themselves against  volatility in world agricultural prices in order to dampen these effects. In this paper, we  explore this dilemma in a CGE model of India that uses a new social accounting matrix  (SAM) developed at the Indira Ghandi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in  Mumbai. The SAM includes extensive disaggregation of agricultural activities, commodity  markets, labor markets, and rural and urban households. This SAM includes 115  commodities, 48 labor types and 352 types of households, (classified by social group, income  class, region, and urban/rural). The CGE model based on this SAM can be used to explore  the linkages between changes in world prices of agriculture and the incomes of poor rural  and urban households, capturing rural-urban linkages in both commodity and factor  markets. The results indicate that the inclusion of linkages between rural and urban labor  markets is necessary to fully explore, and potentially eliminate, the dilemma. A fall in  agricultural prices hurts agricultural producers, lowers wages and/or employment of rural  labor, and in some cases spills over into urban labor markets, depressing wages and incomes  of poor urban households as well. In these cases both rural and urban poverty increases. The  paper explores the strength of these commodity and factor market linkages, and the potential  spillover effects of policies affecting agricultural prices.  |