Category: Uncategorized

Natalia P. Hule, who writes about agriculture and development in India, had a great post a few weeks ago titled “My Tryst with Organic Farming,” in which she discussed how she tried to implement organic sugarcane farming in Tamil Nadu Mandla, Madhya Pradesh as part of her work.

Natalia begins her story as follows:

When I was working in Mandla, I was keen upon the introduction of organic sugarcane production as many farmers near the town of Mandla have access to irrigation. The town is practically surrounded on 3 sides by the Narmada. I went about this in a thorough fashion and chose to do what is recommended by the Tamil Nadu Agriculture University for organic sugarcane production. Below is a description of how reality smacked me straight in the face.

If Congress does nothing, the status quo will revert back to the original 1949 law — which was based on a complex formula dating back to the pre–World War I era, when the earnings of rural farmers and city dwellers were much closer than they are today, says Marin Bozic, an assistant professor in dairy-foods-marketing economics at the University of Minnesota.

This means the USDA would have to pay dairy farmers about twice as much as it does now. But that doesn’t mean $8 milk for a few reasons:

Congress will probably get its act together. We’ve been down this road before, and dire predictions of $8 milk came to naught. “This is Groundhog Day,” Bozic says. “We woke up, and there’s the same song on the radio. If we don’t get the new farm bill, we’ll get an extension.”

My friend and colleague Marin Bozic, quoted in a Time article last week. The article also features a quote by Andy Novakovic, who was director of the Department of Applied Economics (as it was then known) at Cornell when I began my PhD.

In case you have an interest in dairy markets and policy, Marin has a blog dedicated almost entirely to that sector of the economy. And unlike my usual touch-and-go brand of blogging, Marin actually does serious research for his posts!

I began a three-year term as associate editor over at Food Policy at the beginning of November, 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.

Even after a little over month, serving as associate editor at Food Policy has given me new insights into the editorial process, which I might eventually blog about. For now, however, I simply 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.