the aim of the model is to provide illustrative results that show how structural diversity among developing countries and systemic differences between developed and developing countries can affect the welfare and distributional outcomes of alternative agricultural policy interventions models are constructed for six countries for which the riga data referred to above are available two in africa ghana and malawi two in asia bangladesh and viet nam and two in latin america guatemala and nicaragua this is because market price support for food crops harms net buyers of food often the poorest farm and nonfarm landless households although the proportion of net buyers varies significantly across countries support for cash crops does not have this drawback however cash crops are often but not always grown by farmers with relatively high incomes so support seldom reaches the incomes of the poorest