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Category: Food

Published June 5, 2013

The Developmental Paradox

I have been working on a paper on the political economy of agricultural protection in the United States with my colleague Nick Carnes. For his dissertation (and forthcoming book White-Collar Government, which you should go pre-order now if you haven’t already done so), Nick has assembled a nice data set on the legislators of the 106th to the 110th US Congresses (i.e., for the period 1999 to 2009) which, with a little bit of research assistance, allows us to look at the roll-call votes of US legislators on the 2002 and 2008 farm bills, among other outcomes.

I will dedicate a post to that paper when we have a manuscript that is presentable, but I wanted to talk about the “developmental paradox,” since this is something that has been coming up frequently in my research and teaching, and because most readers of this blog are probably unaware of the paradox.

Continue readingThe Developmental Paradox
Published May 24, 2013

Can Urban Agriculture Help with Food Security?

UPDATE (June 26, 2013): It turns out that the paper I had initially linked to in the post below appears to have plagiarized the following paper by Alberto Zezza and Luca Tasciotti:

Zezza, A., and L. Tasciotti (2010), “Urban Agriculture, Poverty, and Food Security. Empirical Evidence from a Sample of Developing Countries,” Food Policy 35(4): 265-273.

If you compare the two abstracts, they are eerily similar to one another. My apologies to Alberto and Luca. I will publish a post rectifying the situation in the next few business days.

(ORIGINAL CONTENT EDITED OUT.)

Published May 14, 2013

Getting Food Aid Right

How many of us read a story of disaster striking people half a world away and respond by getting out our checkbooks?  Tens of millions of us in any given year, and Americans are especially generous. Relief agencies received more than $1.2 billion in the wake of the disastrous 2010 earthquake in Haiti and $3.9 billion following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.  But is anyone foolish enough to go to the local grocery store, buy food and ship it to communities devastated by disaster? Of course not. That would cost much more, take too long to reach people in need, risk spoilage in transit, and likely not provide what is most needed.

Yet with only minor oversimplification, this is precisely what our government’s food aid programs have done since 1954. Our main international food aid programs are authorized through the Farm Bill and must purchase food in, and ship it from, the United States. This system was originally designed to dispose of surpluses the government acquired under farm price support programs that ended decades ago.  These antiquated rules continue today thanks to political inertia in Washington.

As a result, only 40 cents of each taxpayer dollar spent on international food aid actually buys the commodities hungry people eat; the rest goes to shipping and administrative costs. And the median time to deliver emergency food aid is nearly five months. We can do better.

From a longer piece by my friend and frequent coauthor Chris Barrett on CNN’s Global Public Square blog. Chris is also the author with Dan Maxwell of what is without a doubt the best book anyone can read on food aid.