That is the title of a new working paper I have with my Purdue University colleague Bernhard Dalheimer and my Master’s student Weston Loughmiller.
It is nice to be able to share this manuscript, which started with the observation that criticisms on efficiency grounds of policies like farm subsidies, while correct within the narrow framework of the textbook model, broadly tend to miss the mark because they miss an important externality, viz. that being able to protect its citizens from hunger in times of conflict is important for a state. That is, when economists tend to criticize such policies (and, more broadly, agricultural protection), they usually suffer from tunnel vision in that they tend to ignore what the textbook model assumes away, and end up worshipping the symbol (i.e., the model) for the thing symbolized (i.e., reality).
Bernhard and I had been thinking and talking about this for quite a while (if I recall correctly, since he was a postdoc here, sparked by the Russian attack on Ukraine), and recent events (e.g., Canadian PM Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum, the war in Iran) have made this even more relevant than we thought it was going to be. This is also timely because geoconomics (i.e., the study of the use of economic policy to pursue strategic aims) is hitting the big time; Mohr and Trebesch had an overview of the topic in last year’s Annual Review of Economics).
Here is the abstract:
Food has long served as an instrument of statecraft. Yet agricultural economics typically analyzes policy through the lens of consumer and producer welfare, which neglects security externalities. We review the literature at the intersection of agricultural economics and political science, examining how food systems both shape and are shaped by geopolitical forces through the two channels of (i) domestic instability with international spillovers, and (ii) the deliberate use of food in statecraft. Our synthesis of key findings in the literature suggests that (i) food prices relate to riots and instability while ambiguously relating to civil war and violence, (ii) the wide geographic spread of agriculture limits but does not eliminate unilateral coercive leverage compared with other strategic sectors, and (iii) domestic food policies are strongly related to national security goals. Moreover, we point out the many extant data sets one can use to do work in this area and identify several research gaps in the literature. As global uncertainty intensifies, integrating geopolitical analysis into agricultural economics is essential for policy relevance.
As the abstract indicates, our aim was to identify a number of open questions in what we view as an area of research that is too important to ignore. As such, we hope this review launches a thousand ships.
EDIT: Here is a video I had NotebookLM make for policy makers and stakeholders interested in the topic, but who do not have the time or patience to read a 53-page working paper. The prompt was: “Prepare a version of this paper for policy makers and other stakeholders (e.g., people at nonprofits, or in international agencies).”
And here is one Bernhard had NotebookLM make, but using a more general prompt with a view to summarizing the paper:
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