Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
Last week, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released its much-ballyhooed State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011 (SOFI). If you don’t have time to read all 55 pages of the SOFI, you can find the executive summary here, but be forewarned that the link opens a .pdf document.
In honor of World Food Day 2011, and given my interest in food policy as it relates to developing countries, I wanted to spend some time discussing the SOFI’s conclusions.
I began my career in development policy with an internship at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialized agency of the United Nations dedicated to eradicating rural poverty. I had just finished my Masters in December, and I knew I was going to start my PhD the following September, so I was looking for short-term employment to keep me occupied during the spring and fall.
As luck would have it, Quebec’s Ministry of International Relations had organized a number of paid internships in international organizations for recent graduates. One of those internships was with IFAD, in Rome, working with the person in charge of multilateral and interagency affairs.
Back then, the administrator of the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) was Mark Malloch-Brown, a brilliant communicator who had previously worked for The Economist and whose skills as communicator I have admired ever since my time at IFAD, when I had to read a number of his speeches for my work.
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: