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Category: Agriculture

Published August 1, 2012

Ethanol and High Food Prices

It is not often that a stroke of a pen can quickly undo the ravages of nature, but federal regulators now have an opportunity to do just that. Americans’ food budgets will be hit hard by the ongoing Midwestern drought, the worst since 1956. Food bills will rise and many farmers will go bust.

An act of God, right? Well, the drought itself may be, but a human remedy for some of the fallout is at hand — if only the federal authorities would act. By suspending renewable-fuel standards that were unwise from the start, the Environmental Protection Agency could divert vast amounts of corn from inefficient ethanol production back into the food chain, where market forces and common sense dictate it should go.

From an excellent New York Times op-ed by Colin Carter, from the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the UC Davis, and Henry Miller, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Here is a telling series of numbers from the same op-ed:

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Published July 27, 2012

Drought, Extreme Temperature, and the Consequences of High Food Prices

I wish I’d had a chance to write on this topic earlier, but travel to the West Coast for work last week and working on my research this week prevented me from taking the necessary time to read everything I could find on food prices, digest it all, and write something worth reading on the topic.

The crop season started out nicely this spring, with corn producers setting out to cultivate almost 100 million of acres of corn,  the largest cultivated area in 75 years. At the beginning of summer, however, things took a turn for the worst, with many areas experiencing both drought and extreme temperature.

Worry about Extreme Temperatures, Not Drought

Before anything else, I’d like to make one thing clear: Rather than drought, it looks as though it is extreme temperature that is the problem.

Indeed, according to my colleague Mike Roberts at NC State, drought is a poor predictor of crop yields, whereas extreme temperature — defined as the number of days for which temperature exceeds 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit — does a much better job of predicting crop yields.

The impact of temperature on crop yields looks like this (see the original research article here):

Corn Yields and Temperature (Source: Schlenker et al., PNAS 2009).

In other words, though there is a roughly linear relationship between temperature and corn yields from about 10 to about 29 degrees Celsius (i.e., from about 50 to about 84.2 degrees Fahrenheit), at which point corn yields drop sharply.

Continue readingDrought, Extreme Temperature, and the Consequences of High Food Prices
Published June 27, 2012

Chen Guangcheng on Cities and Development in China

Chen Guangcheng (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)

The New York Review of Books published a fascinating interview with Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng yesterday. For those of you who are interested in development, here is the best part:

Do you think urbanization is beneficial to people? They can move to the city and earn more money.

No, I don’t think it’s beneficial. Right now it’s a blind urbanization. Cities grow up naturally over time. Now they’re trying to do it all at once. The main thing about urbanization now is to make the economic statistics look good—to build and pump up economic activity.

There’s nothing positive about urbanization?

I think for those who go to the city and work there’s a benefit. But the current way of villages being turned into towns—I don’t think there’s an advantage to that. People in the village often rely on ordinary kinds of labor to earn a living, like working in the fields, or raising geese or fish and things like that. So now what happens? They turn a village into one high-rise apartment building and that’s all that’s left of the village. Then the land is used for real estate projects controlled by the officials. Where are the people supposed to work? How is that supposed to function?

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