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I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the end of last year, which means that I handle submissions in my areas of expertise, deciding which manuscripts get reviewed and which ones get desk rejected, selecting reviewers for those manuscripts that do get reviewed, and so on.

Once again, I wanted to feature a few articles from the latest issue of the journal. There is nothing special about those articles beyond the fact that I thought they would be of interest to readers of this blog. Those are also regular articles–there is an entire special section of this latest issue dedicated to impact assessment in agricultural research, which you should check out.

Q: What inspired you to launch this?

A: Marc Bellemare’s brilliant piece on Development Bloat in Foreign Affairs from January 2014. It struck me that Marc was making the types of arguments lots of people I talk to make in private, but that you almost never read in print. … The piece – and the idea of Development Bloat as an analytical category – really spoke to me. But I thought that there was much more to it than anyone could hope to cover in one Opinion piece…hence, [the Campaign for Boring Development].

Continue readingCampaign for Boring Development

I attained an important milestone for an agricultural economist yesterday. (No, I was not made a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.) Rather, for the first time in my life, I was called a Monsanto shill:

Our friend M. (in pink) posted a link to that ridiculous article from the Guardian about about how Westerners who eat quinoa are hurting the poor peasants of the Altiplano. I countered by posting a link to my post “Quinoa Nonsense, or Why the World Still Needs Agricultural Economists,” and told M. that it was a bit more complicated than the Guardian wanted it to be, because we really don’t know what the welfare effects of a change in the price of quinoa are.

Soon after, one of M.’s friends (in black up there) chimed in, saying that he’d never heard of quinoa, but that it was most likely a GMO, and that I probably worked for them. After some exchange (and no, he was definitely not joking; I did confirm that with M.), “probably” became “definitely,” presumably as a result of my working for the University of Minnesota… or something?

May I respectfully submit for consideration that the “Monsanto shill” accusation be now considered the food policy and agricultural economics equivalent of Godwin’s Law?