While in the sixties, efficiency was the central and non-negotiable issue in research on staple food markets, this is no longer the case. Here is an irony. The structural adjustment agenda, in pointing critically at the state, has, more often than not, been based on the residual assumption that markets are superior allocative mechanisms. ({ }^{1}) Privatization and liberalization has therefore not needed to be accompanied by empirical research which posed market efficiency as a problem. ({ }^{2})
Simultaneously, theoretical developments in transactions costs economics have made such evaluative research much more difficult by destroying the idea that any operationalized version of competition can be safely used as a norm against which to evaluate real market structure and behaviour. As Timmer explains here, all markets have to cope with transactions costs, asymmetric information and moral hazard. These are far from completely measurable. So, favourable inference about market efficiency given these unknowables tends to be tautological. ({ }^{3}) Assets specificity requires safeguards against opportunism to protect investments made in trade, transport and agro-processing: stable bilateral contracts ensure such safeguards but at the cost of open competition.
A recent new wave of sophistication in price series analysis has been met with a similar methodological scepticism to that which attended the earlier wave. ({ }^{4}) Further, an exciting round of socioeconomic research based on painstaking field work has revealed the embeddedness of market exchange in overarching social institutions of locality, class, ethnicity/religion, gender and age, ({ }^{5}) exposing market exchange as a far from socially neutral allocative mechanism and exposing official price data as an exceptionally reductionist indicator of behaviour. ({ }^{6}) Lastly exchange itself has been deconstructed. Even in OECD economies, dozens of different types of market exchanges occur. ({ }^{7}) The spot contract resulting from open