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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published May 10, 2012

Accounting for Fish and Seafood in Discussions of Food Prices

Discussions of world food prices in the media and among policy makers usually focus on a few select commodities (e.g., maize, wheat, rice, etc.).

Though this obviously omits many other food staples, the underlying assumption is that various kinds of food are substitutes (imperfect ones, but substitutes nonetheless) for one another.

In cases where a more refined notion of food prices is used for discussion, the food price measure used is often the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations’ food price index, which encompasses five categories of food: cereals, dairy, meat, oils and fats, and sugar.

The FAO’s food price index, however, does not include fish and seafood. But since fish and seafood are a key source of protein for almost half of the world’s population, this is an important omission that can lead to making the wrong policy recommendations.

Some of my coauthors thus developed a fish price index similar to the other food (i.e., cereals, dairy, meat, oils and fats, and sugar) price indices already used by the FAO. We recently wrote a paper discussing this new fish price index, which the FAO will incorporate in its food price index sometime this year.

Here is the abstract of our resulting PLoS ONE article on the FAO’s fish price index, titled “Fish Is Food: The FAO’s Fish Price Index,” which was published this week:

World food prices hit an all-time high in February 2011 and are still almost two and a half times those of 2000. Although three billion people worldwide use seafood as a key source of animal protein, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations — which compiles prices for other major food categories — has not tracked seafood prices. We fill this gap by developing an index of global seafood prices that can help to understand food crises and may assist in averting them. The fish price index (FPI) relies on trade statistics because seafood is heavily traded internationally, exposing non-traded seafood to price competition from imports and exports. Easily updated trade data can thus proxy for domestic seafood prices that are difficult to observe in many regions and costly to update with global coverage. Calculations of the extent of price competition in different countries support the plausibility of reliance on trade data. Overall, the FPI shows less volatility and fewer price spikes than other food price indices including oils, cereals, and dairy. The FPI generally reflects seafood scarcity, but it can also be separated into indices by production technology, fish species, or region. Splitting FPI into capture fisheries and aquaculture suggests increased scarcity of capture fishery resources in recent years, but also growth in aquaculture that is keeping pace with demand. Regionally, seafood price volatility varies, and some prices are negatively correlated. These patterns hint that regional supply shocks are consequential for seafood prices in spite of the high degree of seafood tradability.

Tveterås S, Asche F, Bellemare MF, Smith MD, Guttormsen AG, Lem A, Lien K, & Vannuccini S (2012). Fish Is Food – The FAO’s Fish Price Index. PloS one, 7 (5) PMID: 22590598

Published May 9, 2012

Fixing the Peer Review Process by Crowdsourcing It? (Continued)

We call the fallout to any article the “comments,” but since they are often filled with solid arguments, smart corrections and new facts, the thing needs a nobler name. Maybe “gloss.” In the Middle Ages, students often wrote notes in the margins of well-regarded manuscripts. These glosses, along with other forms of marginalia, took on a life of their own, becoming their own form of knowledge, as important as, say, midrash is to Jewish scriptures. The best glosses were compiled into, of course, glossaries and later published — serving as some of the very first dictionaries in Europe.

Any article, journalistic or scientific, that sparks a debate typically winds up looking more like a good manuscript 700 years ago than a magazine piece only 10 years ago. The truth is that every decent article now aspires to become the wiki of its own headline.

Sure, there is still the authority that comes of being a scientist publishing a peer-reviewed paper, or a journalist who’s reported a story in depth, but both such publications are going to be crowd-reviewed, crowd-corrected and, in many cases, crowd-improved. (And sometimes, crowd-overturned.) Granted, it does require curating this discussion, since yahoos and obscenity mavens tend to congregate in comment sections.

That’s from a New York Times op-ed in last weekend’s Sunday Review by Jack Hitt, who is also a frequent contributor to This American Life (here is my favorite This American Life story by Jack Hitt).

Hitt’s point should be be taken more seriously by academics. In all fairness, however, in some corners of academia, the idea is being taken seriously: the AEJs — the four new journals of the American Economic Association — have comments section for every published article (I don’t know why the AEA has not also done so for its flagship journal, the American Economic Review.)

Unfortunately, readers of the AEJs seem to be slow to embrace that change, as few articles appear to have garnered any comments. Moreover, a quick look at the latest issue of each AEJ indicates no comments at all. Perhaps the problem is that one needs to be a member of the AEA to comment.

If those comments thread ever take off, and if other journals start offering similar comment sections, this would be a cheap, quick way of building canonical knowledge within any discipline, as I discussed in my previous post on this topic.

Published May 8, 2012

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap: The Welfare Impacts of Contract Farming

My article on contract farming titled “As You Sow, So Shall You Reap: The Welfare Impacts of Contract Farming” is finally out in World Development. Here is the abstract:

Contract farming is widely perceived as a means of increasing welfare in developing countries. Because of smallholder self-selection in contract farming, however, it is not clear whether contract farming actually increases grower welfare. In an effort to improve upon existing estimates of the welfare impacts of contract farming, this paper uses the results of a contingent-valuation experiment to control for unobserved heterogeneity among smallholders. Using data across several regions, firms, and crops in Madagascar, results indicate that a 1-percent increase in the likelihood of participating in contract farming is associated with a 0.5-percent increase in household income, among other positive impacts.

If I had to summarize the paper’s contribution informally, I’d say the estimates it presents of the welfare impacts of contract farming have better internal and external validity than those found in previous studies.

Click here for an ungated, older version (link opens a .pdf document), but note that the results in the ungated version had not undergone peer review, so they are not as solid.