In my post yesterday, I listed some of the policy options available to curb rising food prices. Third among those options was to “encourage (public) agricultural research, which has practically ground to a halt since the 1980s.”
This week, Science published a very important article by the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service’s Keith Fuglie and coauthors, in which the authors look at the role of private agricultural research. The title of the article is “The Contribution of Private Industry to Agricultural Innovation,” and the abstract is as follows:
Food Prices, Meat Consumption, and Paternalism
I took part it a Triangle Institute for Security Studies event at NC State last week on the theme of “Energy and Security,” where I briefly discussed my work on food prices and social unrest.
At the end of my talk, I mentioned a few policy options that global policy makers could pursue if they want to keep food prices down: