Category: Uncategorized

A few years ago, while reporting on the madness that is European farm subsidies, this columnist came up with a “Richard Scarry” rule of politics. Most politicians hate to confront any profession or industry that routinely appears in children’s books (such as those penned by the late Mr. Scarry). This gives outsize power to such folk as farmers, fishermen, doctors, firemen or—to cite a fine work in the Scarry canon—to firms that build Cars and Trucks and Things That Go. The rule is seldom good news for taxpayers, and there is a logic to that too: picture books rarely show people handing over fistfuls of money to the government.

The Scarry rule was tested afresh on March 7th at the inaugural “Iowa Ag Summit,” a campaign-style forum for politicians pondering White House runs in 2016. Reflecting Iowa’s clout as host of the first caucuses of the presidential election cycle, the summit lured nine putative candidates, all of them Republicans. Democrats were also invited, but declined. Such grandees as Jeb Bush, a former governor of Florida, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey took turns to sit on a dais beside a shiny green tractor, to tell an audience of corn (maize) growers, pork-producers and hundreds of reporters how much they love farmers.

For the past year or so, I have been working on a paper with my colleague Rob King which I am hoping to debut sometime soon in which we look at the relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness.

I have presented that paper twice so far–once at Ohio State, and once at Oklahoma State. Every time I present it, one thing that comes up is whether there is reverse causality, i.e., whether people perceive the foods they buy from farmers markets as safer than the foods they buy at supermarkets, which would lead to a spurious relationship between farmers markets and food-borne illness because increases in the number of outbreaks and cases of food-borne illness would then cause increases in the number of farmers markets.

After my talk at Oklahoma State, I was discussing this with Jayson Lusk, who had invited me to give that talk, and the outcome of our conversation was that we simply didn’t know what most people would think. So Jayson (whose blog you really should be reading if you don’t already) decided to include a question to that effect in his monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS), and which he discussed in a post last week:

[A]n important factor is the relatively poor health of young Indian women. More than 90 percent of adolescent Indian girls are anemic, a crucial measure of poor nutrition. And while researchers have long known that Indian mothers tend to be less healthy than their African counterparts, a new study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that the disparity is far worse than previously believed.

By analyzing census data, Diane Coffey of Princeton University found that 42 percent of Indian mothers are underweight. The figure for sub-Saharan Africa is 16.5 percent.

Ms. Coffey calculated that the average woman in India weighs less at the end of her pregnancy than the average woman in sub-Saharan Africa did at the beginning, an astonishing finding.

“In India, people are richer, better educated and have fewer children than those in sub-Saharan Africa, so it’s really surprising that Indian children are shorter and smaller than those in sub-Saharan Africa,” Ms. Coffey said in an interview. “But when you step back and look at the state of Indian mothers, it’s not such a surprise after all.”

Research has shown that genetics play no role in the size differences, leaving environmental factors as the only explanation, Ms. Coffey said.

The reasons for Indian mothers’ relatively poor health are many, including a culture that discriminates against them. Sex differences in education, employment outside the home, and infant mortality are all greater in India than in Africa.