Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
I spent all day yesterday looking at the relationship between natural disasters and food prices for a new paper I am working on. This led me to wonder about the impacts of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last Friday on food prices.
I did a Q&A last week with The Chronicle — the student newspaper here at Duke University, not the other Chronicle — on, among other things, the relationship between food prices and political unrest:
TC: What sort of relationship exists between food prices and political turmoil?
MB: I think the causal relationship flows mostly from high food prices leading to political unrest. I can’t make a definite causal statement. We can’t observe a world in which nothing would have changed except for food prices, because there are so many factors that cannot be controlled. In the summer of 2008, it is uncanny that during that period of high food prices we had revolt in Indonesia and East Africa. Likewise, we are experiencing high food prices, and we have unrest in the Mediterranean.
Read the whole thing here. As an erratum, note that whoever wrote the lede got my affiliation wrong: I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics, not an Assistant Professor of Economics.
A Steep Rise in US Food Prices?
An article discussing US food prices in yesterday’s The Telegraph had a slightly alarmist title: “US Food Price Rise Is Steepest in Decades.”
While there is no doubt in my mind that this is the steepest rise in food prices this country has experienced in a long time (since before I was born, in fact), let’s not get carried away. Indeed, the article notes how
“[t]he cost of producing finished foods jumped 3.9 percent last month from a year earlier, as harsh winter weather exacerbated the already increasing price of many basic ingredients used in food. The increase was the steepest since November 1974.”
Oh really?
The cost of food worldwide has gone up 62.4 percent last month from a year earlier (i.e., from 145.3 to 236), according to the statistics provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
I understand that The Telegraph compares the US to itself — love thy country fixed effect — but the article should perhaps have noted how this is a relatively small rise in food prices compared to what is going on elsewhere in the world.