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Category: Agriculture

Published May 3, 2013

Organic Is Not the Most Environmentally Friendly Way to Farm

 Contrary to widespread consumer belief, organic farming is not the best way to farm from an environmental point of view. The guiding principle of organic is to rely exclusively on natural inputs.  That was decided early in the 20th century, decades before before the scientific disciplines of toxicology, environmental studies and climate science emerged to inform our understanding of how farming practices impact the environment.  As both farming and science have progressed, there are now several cutting edge agricultural practices which are good for the environment, but difficult or impossible for organic farmers to implement within the constraints of their pre-scientific rules.

From a fascinating post by plant pathologist S.D. Savage, in which he gives six reasons why organic agriculture is not the most environmentally friendly way to farm.

People interested in food policy (PPS590 students, even though your term paper is due tonight, this means you) should read Savage’s post in full, but if you are in a hurry, here are those six reasons:

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Published April 30, 2013

Reform Food Aid

From an editorial in last Sunday’s New York Times:

Food aid is one of the most important tools of American foreign policy. Since the mid-1950s, the United States has spent nearly $2 billion annually to feed the world’s poor, saving millions of lives. But the process is so rigid and outdated that many more people who could be helped still go hungry. Reforms proposed by President Obama will go a long way toward fixing that problem and should be promptly enacted by Congress.

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Published April 3, 2013

The Impacts of Commodity Price Volatility in Ethiopia

How does commodity price volatility affect the welfare of rural households in developing countries, for whom hedging and consumption smoothing are often difficult? And when governments choose to intervene in order to stabilize commodity prices, as they often do, who gains the most? This article develops an analytical framework and an empirical strategy to answer those questions, along with illustrative empirical results based on panel data from rural Ethiopian households. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility are increasing in household income, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

That’s the abstract of an article Chris Barrett, David Just, and I have been working on since 2007, and which has just been accepted for publication by the American Journal of Agricultural Economics.

In this article, we ask the question: What is the effect on rural households of increasing the uncertainty (i.e., volatility) surrounding the prices of the staple crops they produce and consume, holding the levels of those same prices constant? In other words, we isolate the impact of an increase in the variance of a price distribution holding the mean of that price distribution constant, and we look at the effects of the covariance between each pair of prices, since a price never varies alone.

To answer those questions, we use publicly available survey data from rural Ethiopia and study the welfare impacts of volatility in the prices of coffee, maize, beans, barley, wheat, teff, and sorghum.

This article, I think, is my best piece of research so far, and it is not without reason that I used it as my job-market paper this year. It really has everything one wants one’s research articles to have:

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