In January 2013, I wrote a post titled Quinoa Nonsense, of Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists. That was the second one of my posts to go viral.*
And did that post ever take me places–both figuratively and literally.
It figuratively took me places, because after I wrote that post, Seth Gitter got in touch with me to mention he’d been meaning to look at the effects of the quinoa price spike, and to ask whether I’d be interested in collaborating on that. Because of the same post, The Economist ran an article in their Leaders section last year titled “In praise of quinoa,” in which they were talking about the wonders of international trade, and in which they name-checked me. (In the same article, they also name-checked Saddam Hussein and Donald Trump, so make of that what you will.)
And it literally took me places, because Seth and I were soon thereafter flying to Peru to consult for the International Trade Center on the welfare impacts of the quinoa price spike. That was the first of several trips to Peru, a country where I am planning on doing more work as early as next summer.
In my January 2013 post, I ranted against journalists who present uninformed, sloppy thoughts as gospel. My foremost example then was this excerpt from an article in the Guardian:
[T]here is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fueled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture.
First things first: “larder” is British for “pantry.”
Second, it doesn’t take a PhD in agricultural and applied economics to understand that the reasoning in the Guardian excerpt above is predicated on a number of assumptions that are unlikely to hold (e.g., the assumption that there are no close substitutes for quinoa other than imported junk food).
(Or maybe it does. When I wrote my post in January 2013, in my previous job, I was surrounded with people who, more often than not, had weak opinions strongly held about the economics of food and agriculture.)
What started with a passionate rant about people talking through their hat about things they don’t know about has culminated this past week–five years later!–in my article titled “Foods and Fads: The Welfare Impacts of Rising Quinoa Prices in Peru” (with Seth Gitter, but also with my former PhD student Johanna Fajardo-Gonzalez) being published in World Development.
Here is the abstract:
Riding on a wave of interest in “superfoods” in rich countries, quinoa went in less than a decade from being largely unknown outside of South America to being an upper-class staple in the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. As a result, concerned commentators suggested that the rising international demand for quinoa, which tripled prices, might have substantially harmed Peruvian quinoa consumers. We study the impacts of rising quinoa prices on the welfare of Peruvian households. Our analysis suggests these fears are unwarranted. A descriptive analysis shows that quinoa is a small part (<1%) of the average household’s budget share for the roughly 30% of households that consume quinoa. Our econometric analysis generally finds that as quinoa prices rose, welfare increased in regions with higher concentrations of quinoa consumers. Specifically, we use 11 years of a large-scale, nationally representative household survey to construct pseudo-panels at three geographic (district, province, and department) levels to look at the relationship between the international price of quinoa and the value of real household consumption, our proxy for household welfare. We find for the two smaller geographic regions (i.e., districts and provinces) higher concentrations of quinoa consumption or production are associated with a small and statistically significant increase in household welfare in response to quinoa price increases; in the largest regions (i.e., departments), higher concentrations of quinoa consumption or production are associated with small declines in welfare of less than 1% of total household consumption. Our findings that the international trade of quinoa has not been harmful to household welfare in Peru thus run counter to some of the myths surrounding quinoa.
A few thoughts about all of this:
- Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short. This took five years. Granted, a lot of those five years were spent working on other things, but I remember drafting the intro to this article at a coffee shop down the street from where I live in January 2015, sitting there with a friend who was studying for an exam.
- The most interesting work from a media or policy perspective is not necessarily the most interesting work from an academic perspective. This got talked up in the media and generated interest from policy makers, but at the end of the day, from a purely scholarly perspective, this is far from my best work.
- I am grateful that, at this point in my career, I can work on a mixture of “hot” topics such as this one (or food waste, or farmers markets), which pique the interest of people outside of academia, and more traditional topics such as contract farming or price risk, which would probably bore people outside of academia to tears.
- With all of that said, now is probably a good time to come out of the (quinoa) closet, and publicly state that I don’t even like quinoa. The one palatable quinoa recipe I have come across was given to me by my brother–a quinoa “salad” (really, more like dessert) with apples, smoked Gouda cheese, and maple syrup in it.
* The first one of my posts to go viral was titled The Trading Game: A Simple, Easy to Run In-Class Experiment, and it went viral thanks to having been the object of a post by Greg Mankiw.