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Marc F. Bellemare Posts

Published January 9, 2012

Food Prices and Social Unrest One More Time

If you have taken a principles of economics class, you know that everything else equal, an increase in the price of a good means that you can afford less of that good. So if you value a given good, the consequence of an increase in the price of that good is that you are worse off.

If you live in the United States, your household dedicates about 13 percent of its budget to food. But if instead you lived in a developing country, that figure would be well over 50 percent.

It should thus come as no surprise that increases in the price of food are especially bad for the poor in developing countries. (…)

[A]fter attaining a peak during the summer of 2008, food prices started rising rapidly again in the second half of 2010 to hit an all-time high in March of 2011.

Likewise (…) the 2008 and 2011 spikes in food prices coincided with spikes in the number of food riots reported in the news.

But as I constantly remind the students in my development seminar, correlation is not causation, and a key component of critical thinking is the ability to question correlations presented as causal claims. In other words, social unrest may lead to high food prices just as much as the opposite is true.

That’s me in a guest post over at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s New Security Beat blog, in which I explain how I overcome the problem to show that rising food prices most likely cause social unrest.

Published January 6, 2012

Always Something New Out of Africa?

[T]here is a great deal more to Africa than wars and famines.

The problem is that news, as defined by news editors throughout the media, is when something important or interesting happens. There is no conspiracy about African coverage (though there is a great deal of laziness among editors who are happy to limit their story selection to images of dramatic disasters.) And news organizations must cover stories of starvation and war as they would cover disasters in the rest of the world. The question is where are the African stories that show the fuller picture?

Years of covering Africa taught me not to go on holiday at Christmas or in August when nothing much happened in the world. That was when desperate news editors with space to fill might finally run that article on Namibia’s politics or Mali’s nomads. But there was always the eternal nagging news editor’s question: “So what?”

That’s Richard Dowden, in a post over at African Arguments.

In a way, it’s comforting to know that development economists are not alone, and that the “So what?” question is not exclusively asked to development economists by other, non-development economists.

Dowden’s Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles, which I have read on Kim Yi Dionne‘s recommendation (it is compulsory reading in her African politics class), is a highly readable introduction to Africa in all its diversity. It’s a great read if, like me, your African experience is limited to about five countries. I imagine it’s an even better read if all you know about Africa is from reading the news.