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Category: Famine

Published March 1, 2012

Free Download of Calestous Juma’s “The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa”

Calestous Juma’s most recent book The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa is now available for free from the Kennedy School of Government website. Here is an overview of the book:

African agriculture is currently at a crossroads, at which persistent food shortages are compounded by threats from climate change. But, as this book argues, Africa faces three major opportunities that can transform its agriculture into a force for economic growth: advances in science and technology; the creation of regional markets; and the emergence of a new crop of entrepreneurial leaders dedicated to the continent’s economic improvement.

Filled with case studies from within Africa and success stories from developing nations around the world, The New Harvest outlines the policies and institutional changes necessary to promote agricultural innovation across the African continent. Incorporating research from academia, government, civil society, and private industry, the book suggests multiple ways that individual African countries can work together at the regional level to develop local knowledge and resources, harness technological innovation, encourage entrepreneurship, increase agricultural output, create markets, and improve infrastructure.

If you are like me and prefer to have the entire book in a single .pdf file, scroll down on the page for a link to the complete text of the book.

Calestous is also a prolific tweeter. You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

Published February 2, 2012

US Food Aid Does Have an Impact in Developing Countries, Just Not the One You Think It Has (Updated)

A new working paper by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian:

This paper examines the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. To establish a causal relationship, we exploit time variation in food aid caused by fluctuations in US wheat production together with cross-sectional variation in a country’s tendency to receive any food aid from the United States. Our estimates show that an increase in US food aid increases the incidence, onset and duration of civil conflicts in recipient countries. Our results suggest that the effects are larger for smaller scale civil conflicts. No effect is found on interstate warfare.

This is bound to make waves among food policy scholars and in Washington, DC, where the Farm Bill, part of which sets guidelines for the provision of food aid, is due to be renewed this year.

I have not yet had a chance to read the paper (I’m teaching two classes this semester, so most of my reading time goes to those; I’ve been on the same “pleasure”-reading book since before Christmas), so please take the following with a grain of salt since it’s off the top of my head, but I wonder whether it might have made for cleaner identification to use weather shocks (specifically, extreme weather events and natural disasters) as a source of exogenous variation instead of fluctuations in US wheat production.

In other words, it could perhaps be the case that US wheat production affects conflict through means other than US food aid, so using unpredictable shocks to the supply of US food aid might make for more solid identification. But as I said, I have not yet had a chance to read the paper, and Nunn and Qian are both careful empiricists, so they probably address my concern somewhere in the paper.

UPDATE: Jon Prettyman, a Masters of Public Policy student advisee of mine, just emailed with this: “I saw the Nunn and Qian paper on several blogs today and I’m reading through it now, primarily because it sounds an awful lot like my thesis, and came across the answer to the question from your post.  They did use weather in an earlier draft of the paper, but found that wheat production yields similar estimates and is easier to interpret.”

Published January 30, 2012

Who Wins and Who Loses During Food Crises?

In a very good article in the latest issue of Science, Jo Swinnen and one of his coauthors explain that, as with many other changes in economic circumstances, rising food prices are a boon to some people and a bane to others. Here is the summary:

Spikes in food prices have pushed food security to the top of the global policy agenda. Price increases have mixed effects on poverty and hunger: They increase the cost of food for consumers but increase incomes of farmers, who represent the bulk of the world’s poor. Net effects will differ depending on whether poor households or countries buy or import, or sell or export food (infrastructure, institutions, and market imperfections will play roles, as well). Policies to influence prices imply winners and losers, not just between rich and poor, but also among the poor. These nuances are too often absent in public debate, to the detriment of policy-making. Moreover, the arguments put forward today, that high food prices generally hurt the poor, are in contrast with those put forward a few years ago, that low food prices were hurting the poor.

Put simply, when food prices rise, food producers benefit and food consumers lose out. But while the media used to causally link low food prices to poverty and hunger, it was high food prices instead that were blamed for poverty and hunger during the food crises of 2008 and of 2010-2011.

Continue readingWho Wins and Who Loses During Food Crises?