I have received the following call for papers from Paul Glewwe:
Published August 29, 2011
Category: Development
Published August 23, 2011
Some Thoughts on Food Prices and Famine
Tom Murphy had an interesting post on food prices last week in which he discussed how food prices remain very high, but how they are not the only culprit behind the current famine in the Horn of Africa. At the end of his post, Tom wrote that he hoped I would comment on the role of food prices and agriculture.
Sadly, I have very little to add. In June, the price of food was 39 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
But given that the FAO’s food price index encompasses five categories of food, this statistic masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity. Looking at the five categories that make up the food price index, we get the following price increases:
Brooks Goes Kristof
A column by David Brooks in Monday’s New York Times, which seems to have gone unnoticed by the development chatterati:
“As you talk to people involved in the foreign aid business — on the giving and the receiving ends — you are struck by how much disillusionment there is.