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Category: Agriculture

Published February 26, 2013

The System of Rice Intensification: A Miracle Solution?

(Note: This is a guest post from my friend, colleague, and coauthor Christine Moser, who is an associate professor of economics at Western Michigan University, and whose research agenda lies at the intersection of development economics and environmental economics.)

RiceMadagascar
Rice Cultivation in Ambositra, Madagascar (Source: WikiMedia Commons).

The system of rice intensification (SRI) was developed in the 1980s by a French priest working with farmers in Madagascar and has since been promoted in rice-producing countries around the world. SRI occasionally makes an appearance in the international press, such as in this recent article in The Guardian.

Proponents of SRI tout not just the yield gains derived from the technique, but the fact that SRI does not require purchased inputs such as chemical fertilizer or improved seeds, and therefore should be accessible to the poor. SRI can also greatly reduce water use, a huge advantage in some parts of the world.

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Published February 20, 2013

The Economics of Food Price Volatility

That’s the title of a forthcoming NBER book edited by Jean-Paul Chavas, David Hummels, and Brian Wright which summarizes the papers presented at a conference held last summer in Seattle.

The conference featured papers on many aspects of the twin problems of high and volatile food prices, and it convened most of the world’s expert on food prices in one room for a few days.

I was a discussant on Kym Anderson, Maros Ivanic, and Will Martin’s paper looking at the impacts of export bans on poverty. Recall that when food prices spike, it is not uncommon for developing countries to adopt a host of protectionist measures designed to insulate themselves from high food prices. Though those policies exacerbate the problem of high international food prices, they presumably help domestically.

The Anderson et al. paper can be found here. My discussion, in which I also briefly sketch the outline of a formal theoretical model of the political economy of agricultural protection, can be found here. The link above contains links to every chapter in the book, which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Published February 18, 2013

James Scott on Why We Should Study Agriculture

You are an agrarian by training; yet all of your texts are decisively political. What’s so political about agriculture? And what are the policy implications for state-making and development in the Third World?

I think that as the major way of sustenance, as the major resource over which people struggle—questions of land and irrigation water and food supply and famine—are at the very center of the history of political struggles. They are the elementary version of politics and that’s why it seems to me that a concern with such issues as farming is directly and immediately a concern with politics.

Back to the ‘modern, developed world’: in Western Europe and the US, the agricultural section makes up typically 5% of the population. Yet they tend to be heavily overrepresented politically in respect to their demographic weight in many respects because of questions of rural policy, political districting, subsidies… Smallholders and petty bourgeoisie are very important for right-wing parties. They are protected and subsidized to a point where surpluses accumulate and we actually make it difficult for the Third World to export. In a truly neoclassical world, we wouldn’t be subsidizing agriculture and we’d be getting most of our agricultural supplies from poor countries on the periphery of Europe and Latin America. Even in a place like India, which is industrializing and urbanizing rapidly, the fact is that the rural population and the people that live off of agriculture and related activities has never been higher than it is today—even though the proportion is declining, the population is growing at such a rate that this tendency can be marked.

That’s James Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology at Yale University and author of The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Seeing Like a State, as well as quite a few other influential social science books, on why social scientists should study agriculture, agrarian societies, and agricultural policy.

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