It’s always a good day when a leading media outlet picks up some of my research. It does not get much better than when The Economist does so.
From an article in this week’s issue:
Although concerns for the poorest Peruvians were misplaced in 2013, there may be cause to worry now. The high prices of 2013-14 prompted many more people to start growing quinoa, from entrepreneurial Bolivian taxi drivers to large agribusinesses. European farmers got in on the act, too. Quinoa is now grown in around 50 countries, according to James Livingstone-Wallace, founder of Quinola, a quinoa supplier.
That means a lot more supply: the combined volume of quinoa exports from Peru and Bolivia to the European Union rose by 227% between 2012 and 2015. Prices, naturally, have plummeted—by 40% between September 2014 and August 2015 alone. Following that drop, wages in the two regions that had traditionally produced the most quinoa fell by 5%, and total food consumption by 10%, according to a new report from the International Trade Centre, a development agency.
The same study suggests that many Andean farmers are hoarding quinoa, in the hope that prices will rise again. But European farmers are doing the same, according to Freek Jan Koekoek, a consultant. In other words, there is a real chance that prices could fall further, as farmers despair and sell their stocks.
If that happens, the marginal producers likely to be pushed out of business by the glut are the original ones: poor Andean farmers. They grow quinoa because little else thrives on their steep, barren plots. Their new competitors, tilling better soil with modern farming equipment, manage yields that are up to eight times higher.
The emphasis is mine. Here, The Economist is talking about the report (link opens a .pdf) I coauthored with Seth Gitter, Alex Kasterine, Efrain Obregon, and Ann-Kathrin Zotz.
In that report, we present a number of descriptive statistics on the 150 households Efrain and his team interviewed quarterly for us in 2014-2015 in the Puno and Cuzco regions of Peru. The main takeaway that emerges from our report, at least for me, is that rather than worry about high quinoa prices, as some did back in 2013, we might need to worry about low quinoa prices instead. (And if I may make an armchair behavioral argument: Reference points and loss aversion might be what pushes quinoa producers to hold on to their grain rather than sell it.)
I started reading The Economist in 1996, during my first semester of college. Had you told me back then that my work would be featured in that newspaper 20 years later, I would not have believed it. Achievement unlocked, as kids say these days…