Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
Earlier this week, Marcus Samuelsson, chef and author of New American Table, had a post on his HuffPo blog about the global impacts of US agricultural policy. Samuelsson begins by implying a dubious causal link from food prices to political unrest in Egypt, noting along the way how
I have a new working paper with Chris Barrett, Maren Bachke, Hope Michelson, Sudha Narayanan, and Tom Walker on agricultural value chains in developing countries. Here is the abstract:
“Supermarkets, specialized wholesalers, and processors and agro-exporters’ agricultural value chains have begun to transform the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low-income economies. We develop a conceptual framework through which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity-processing firm. We then conduct an empirical meta-analysis of agricultural value chains in five countries across three continents (Ghana, India, Madagascar, Mozambique, and Nicaragua). We document patterns of participation, the welfare gains associated with participation, reasons for non-participation, the significant extent of contract non-compliance, and the considerable dynamism of these value chains, as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently.”
Comments and suggestions would be most welcome.
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On Mark Bittman’s Future Food Manifesto (Updated)
A few weeks ago, the New York Times‘ Mark Bittman wrote a column entitled “A Food Manifesto for the Future,” in which he offered his thoughts as to how to “make the growing, preparation and consumption of food healthier, saner, more productive, less damaging and more enduring.” Bittman’s suggestions are very much in line with the expectations and beliefs of the bien-pensant, as befits someone writing for the newspaper of record, but some of his suggestions were highly impractical.
I wanted to discuss his column earlier on but other more pressing events happened in terms of food policy which I chose to discuss first, and this has been a busy week, so my apologies for the lateness of these comments.
Among Bittman’s thoughts were: