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Category: Development

Published December 16, 2011

Food Prices Helped Trigger the Arab Spring

And it looks like I am no longer the one saying it: the following VOA news clip features both International Food Policy Research Institute director-general Shenggen Fan as well as my coauthor Chris Barrett:

For more in-depth reading on this topic, see:

(HT: Chris Barrett, via Facebook.)

 

Published December 13, 2011

The #SWEDOW Sideshow Slideshow

Courtesy of Foreign Policy, a slideshow showing the various things (too many people think) developing countries need:

Most of us don’t have billions of dollars to give away like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. But the charitable impulse is still strong: combined, Americans gave away almost $300 billion in 2010. Sometimes, though, good intentions have questionable results. In the rush to help after a crisis, public and private donors from around the world sometimes give without quite realizing what the needs on the ground are. Do Haitians really need your used yoga mat? Do the Balkans lack for clowns?

Pop-Tarts, yoga mats, and teddy bears, oh my!

Published December 7, 2011

How Do the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest?

On Monday, I gave a Massachusetts Avenue Development Seminar (MADS) at the Center for Global Development (CGD). According to the CGD website:

The MADS is a ten year-old research seminar series that brings some of the world’s leading development scholars to discuss their new research and ideas. The presentations meet an academic standard of quality and are at times technical, but retain a focus on a mixed audience of researchers and policymakers.

The title of my talk was “Food Prices and Riots: Estimating How the Level and Volatility of Food Prices Shape Social Unrest in the Developing world, 1990-2011.” I presented results from this paper, which I have often talked about on this blog. The slides for my talk are available here.

One of the interesting things about presenting in the MADS series is that you get a discussant. My discussant was my friend and colleague Ed Carr, who is an associate professor of geography at the University of South Carolina and who is currently on leave at the US Agency for International Development.

It was very nice to get Ed’s very insightful comments given how much work he has done on agricultural development and on the environment (he discusses a lot of his work in his recent book, Delivering Development). And given his expertise on climate change, Ed was the ideal person to discuss my paper, given my use of natural disasters to identify the causal relationship flowing from food prices to social unrest.