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Category: Self-Promotion

Drought and Food Prices: Yours Truly in the Media

Droughts, and the famines they cause, are rarely down to one factor.

“Food crises rarely, if ever, occur because of an overall lack of food to go around,” said Professor Marc F. Bellemare, an agricultural economist at Duke University in North Carolina.

“Rather, they occur because of structural and political problems. Sure, food is scarce in the Sahel, which makes it very expensive.

“But in most places, when food is scarce, food prices increase, which should in principle provide an incentive for traders to import food and distribute it to the areas that need it most.

“In the Sahel, a drought sparked the current food crisis, but poor infrastructure and conflict combined to create the perfect storm of constraints to food imports and food distribution.”

From an article in the UK version of Metro which was published last week.

And then there’s this, from AllAfrica.com:

There is potential to make and save a lot of money predicting the international market, but governments who have yet to, for example, integrate their own farmers into their country’s domestic agricultural market will find these tools offer little in the grand scheme of their concerns.

In many countries, farmers sell only to their neighbours or farm for their own subsistence, effectively barring them from domestic markets.

Marc Bellemare, a public policy assistant professor at Duke University, said tools like the Food Security Media Analysis are a “laudable effort … but what developing countries need is better infrastructure and governance.”

Countries that still lack access to even basics like decent roads will struggle to take advantage of new technology, in other words.

 

Media Appearance: CCTV-America Tonight between 9 and 10 PM

If you are interested in food prices — more specifically, in the impacts of the current drought on food prices — I will be on CCTV America, the American channel of Chinese Central Television (the main state television broadcaster in China), between 9 and 10 PM tonight.

I will be on a panel with Steven Bowen, a senior scientist at Aon Benfield Impact Forecasting. Going by the CCTV America website, it looks as though I will be on a program called Biz Asia America.

Commodity Exchanges, Commodity Speculation, and Food Security in Africa

The Floor of the Chicago Board of Trade

A farmer lives with two time horizons in mind. One is the months-long growing seasons his crops abide by. The other is the immediate reality of having to feed his family each day, regardless of the price of grain at harvest in three months, whether a drought will wither plants in the field, or whether perfect rains will yield a bumper crop.

Across rural Africa, such uncertainty hounds smallholder farmers—which is nearly everyone. In Ethiopia, 80 percent of the population of more than 80 million are small-scale farmers and produce 95 percent of the country’s agricultural output.

If more and better information within agricultural markets can make uncertainty recede like darkness in front of a candle, the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange is a bank of high-powered floodlights. A commodity exchange that broadcast crop prices to rural farmers not only helps them get higher prices for their produce, but also improves the food distribution system to resist shortages in times of drought.

That’s from a recent article in GOOD magazine by Tate Watkins.

The article discusses the potential for commodity exchanges to improve food security in Africa. In a nutshell, at times of impending food scarcity, commodity exchanges can help by raising food prices, which can help avert food crises and famines. This helps food consumers by improving their food security.

But commodity exchanges can help food producers by smoothing prices over time. That is, commodity exchanges can help reduce the uncertainty over the prices farmers will face come harvest time, which in turn leads farmers to making more efficient production decisions.

What about Commodity Speculation?

This is in stark contrast with the oft-touted “fact” according to which commodity speculation caused the food crisis of 2008. If you are interested in commodity speculation, see this Energy Economics article by Scott Irwin and Dwight Sanders, in which the authors argue that there is little to no causal evidence that commodity speculation led to the 2008 spike in food prices.

Tate interviewed me for the GOOD magazine article quoted above, and one of the things I said ended up making it to the article. I will always be grateful to Tate for bringing to my attention the Kansas City Star‘s style guide, which supposedly helped Ernest Hemingway develop his distinctive style. Tate has his own blog here, and you can follow him on Twitter here.