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I was in Ithaca last week to give a talk at Cornell’s Institute for African Development (and, incidentally, work with coauthors on a few projects). The title of my talk was “The Food Security Impacts of Participation in Agricultural Value Chains.”

If you have an interest in the topic of agricultural value chains and contract farming, you can find my slides here. Comments are most welcome, given that the results therein are very preliminary.

The abstract of a great new article by Jean-François Maystadt and Olivier Ecker in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics titled “Extreme Weather and Civil War: Does Drought Fuel Conflict in Somalia through Livestock Prices?”:

A growing body of evidence shows a causal relationship between extreme weather events and civil conflict incidence at the global level. We find that this causality is also valid for droughts and local violent conflicts in a within-country setting over a short time frame in the case of Somalia. We estimate that a one standard deviation increase in drought intensity and length raises the likelihood of conflict by 62%. We also find that drought affects conflict through livestock price changes, establishing livestock markets as the primary channel of transmission in Somalia.

The emphasis is mine. And in case anyone wondered, I was not a reviewer for this paper (and generally, I try not blog about the papers I get to review…)

A graduate student whose (excellent) second-year paper was accepted at a few conferences came to my office last week to ask me how she should prepare her conference presentations. Because I have never given much thought to how I actually do prepare for conference and seminar presentations, I told her I would write a blog post on the topic after thinking about it. So here is my list of tips on how to prepare conference and seminar presentations, in no particular order. I’m sure I’m forgetting many things; please feel free to include your own best tips in the comments section.