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Category: Food

Published November 9, 2011

The Causes and Consequences of Famine (Slides)

Last Wednesday, I took part in a panel discussion at Wake Forest University titled “The ‘F’-Word: Famine in the 21st Century,” on the current famine in the Horn of Africa.

The other two participants were Charles Kennedy and Sarah Lischer, both professors in the political science department at Wake Forest. Sarah talked about the humanitarian consequences of the current famine, most notably the refugees coming into Kenya. Charles talked about US foreign policy in the area. I learned a lot from both their presentations, given that they covered topics that I was not familiar with.

Here are the slides I used for my talk, which was titled “The Causes and Consequences of Famine.” The link opens a .pdf document. Note that this was not a research seminar, but a talk aimed at a general public.

Published November 4, 2011

Food Deserts: Health Impacts and a Short Reading List

From an article in this week’s issue of The Economist:

This part of Chicago’s South Side is in the heart of one of America’s many food deserts. These are notable not for the absence of food, but for the kind of food available. Though crisps, sweets and doughnuts are easy to come by, an apple is a rare commodity. Yet all the evidence shows that poor access to quality food results in a higher risk of obesity, diabetes and cancer — and more avoidable deaths.

Although cynics might argue that the market gives people the food they deserve, research published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests otherwise. During the 1990s, when the American government paid for around 1,800 women to move out of public housing, the women who had moved showed a 20% lower rate of obesity and diabetes than those who had not. In other words, their improved environment (which many assume would include better shops) led to their better health.

Here is a link to the New England Journal of Medicine article by Ludwig et al., which relies on a randomized controlled trial. Here is the Wikipedia page discussing food deserts.

This article by Marcel Fafchamps and Ruth Vargas Hill lists many scholarly references on food deserts. In particular, I would check out those by Alcaly and Klevorick (1971), Caraher et al. (1998), Goodman (1968), Whelan et al. (2002), and Wrigley et al. (2002).

Published November 1, 2011

The Food Stamp Explosion

Taking a page from Hans Rosling, Tufts School of Nutrition associate professor Parke Wilde and his coauthors have developed a fascinating Google Gadget to help visualize the evolution of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), i.e., of the food stamp program. Parke’s post on the topic is here.

The SNAP is one of the US government’s most important programs aimed at helping the poor (and, for those of us who teach principles of microeconomics, it also provides a great in-class example when teaching about budget constraints.)

The gadget developed by Parke and his coauthors allows one to track either the number of SNAP participants or the proportion of SNAP participants as a percentage of the population against other indicators — population or unemployment rate — for all 50 states plus the District of Columbia over the last 20 years.

For example, looking at North Carolina where I live, I see that the state went from a proportion of food stamp users of 6.3 percent for an unemployment rate of 3.8 percent in 1990 to a proportion of food stamp users of 14.1 percent for an unemployment rate of 10.9 percent. It is particularly disturbing, however, to watch the proportion of SNAP participants explode after 2008 all over the country.