From WRAL news:
“Speaking to a room full of ambassadors to the Rome-based United Nations food agencies, Clinton warned that some countries had adopted ‘unwise’ policies such as export bans during the 2007-2008 food crises ‘that only made matters worse’ by driving up prices, encouraging hoarding and panic buying and discouraging farmers from producing more. (…)
‘Rising food prices can have a positive effect if they send a signal to farmers to grow and sell more. But that can only happen if there is transparency in markets and stocks, so signals about prices and food supply are accurately received,’ Clinton said.
She called for countries to adopt better policies this time around and said the United States was working with developing and industrialized nations ‘to encourage everyone to respond to rising food prices not with failed policies of the past but with a sounder approach.'”
Secretary Clinton is right. Developing countries should resist the temptation to close themselves off to international trade by restricting food exports. Such measures only serve to exacerbate the problem of raising food prices. This in turn increases the number of people suffering from hunger.
What can be done to curb rising food prices? First off, investments in agricultural research and biotechnology have the potential to bring considerable productivity gains in agriculture. Second, the US government should allow developing countries to truly tap into their comparative advantage instead of undercutting them by subsidizing American farmers.
(HT: Camille Jackson.)
Marc,
I agree with you wholeheartedly, with one exception — the role of biotechnology. All the fancy seed in the world is worth little (and won’t solve anything) if it is sewn “along the path” or “on rocky ground” (to reverse engineer a parable), which is what is happening all too often at the present time. Without attention to the quality of the soil (and repairing what has been damaged by years of neglect and bad advice), all the “improved inputs” in the world do little more than temporarily mask the underlying factors contributing to unproductive, unsustainable and vulnerable (non-resilient) agro-ecosystems. The basic principles are widely known, but not widely adhered to.
Doug
Thanks for your comment, Doug, and for this precision. Between the two of us, you are by far the expert on agro-ecosystems, and I agree that improving (or only maintaining!) soil fertility is key. My take on it was broader (and perhaps simpler) in the sense that we need to stop keeping biotechnology from within reach of sub-Saharan Africa, à la Paarlberg (2009).