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Category: Food

Published February 26, 2013

The System of Rice Intensification: A Miracle Solution?

(Note: This is a guest post from my friend, colleague, and coauthor Christine Moser, who is an associate professor of economics at Western Michigan University, and whose research agenda lies at the intersection of development economics and environmental economics.)

RiceMadagascar
Rice Cultivation in Ambositra, Madagascar (Source: WikiMedia Commons).

The system of rice intensification (SRI) was developed in the 1980s by a French priest working with farmers in Madagascar and has since been promoted in rice-producing countries around the world. SRI occasionally makes an appearance in the international press, such as in this recent article in The Guardian.

Proponents of SRI tout not just the yield gains derived from the technique, but the fact that SRI does not require purchased inputs such as chemical fertilizer or improved seeds, and therefore should be accessible to the poor. SRI can also greatly reduce water use, a huge advantage in some parts of the world.

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Published February 20, 2013

The Economics of Food Price Volatility

That’s the title of a forthcoming NBER book edited by Jean-Paul Chavas, David Hummels, and Brian Wright which summarizes the papers presented at a conference held last summer in Seattle.

The conference featured papers on many aspects of the twin problems of high and volatile food prices, and it convened most of the world’s expert on food prices in one room for a few days.

I was a discussant on Kym Anderson, Maros Ivanic, and Will Martin’s paper looking at the impacts of export bans on poverty. Recall that when food prices spike, it is not uncommon for developing countries to adopt a host of protectionist measures designed to insulate themselves from high food prices. Though those policies exacerbate the problem of high international food prices, they presumably help domestically.

The Anderson et al. paper can be found here. My discussion, in which I also briefly sketch the outline of a formal theoretical model of the political economy of agricultural protection, can be found here. The link above contains links to every chapter in the book, which is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

Published February 5, 2013

Sen on Famine (and a Reflection on Hunger)

In a situation of direct entitlement failure, food availability in shops may not go down very much even when total food availability sharply goes down. When during the Irish famine in late 1846, people were starving, Major Parker, the local Relief Inspector sent the following report on December 21st from Skibbereen: “On Saturday, notwithstanding all this distress, there was a market plentifully supplied with meat, bread, fish, in short everything. Similar reports from all over Ireland made Trevelyan insist that all the “resources” of the country should be, as he put it, “drawn out.” In fact, however, the apparently paradoxical situation had arisen from a decline in entitlement in excess of the supply of food. That situation is, in fact, quite a common occurrence in famines. What has to be guaranteed to prevent starvation is not food availability but food entitlement.

That’s 1998 Nobel laureate for economics Amartya Sen, in an 1980 essay in World Development titled “Famines,” which I assigned as a reading in my food policy seminar.

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