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52 search results for "farmers' markets"

Published August 25, 2011

American Farmers Encounter Competition, Don’t Like It

An article in the New York Times last Sunday:

“Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of August 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.

Here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where hand-painted signs for fresh vegetables dot winding roads and eating local has long been a way of life, some farmers and market managers are uttering something once unfathomable: there are too many farmers’ markets.”

Oh no! Heaven forbid that consumers — who, last I checked, still vastly outnumbered farmers — would actually have too much choice and pay too little for healthful foods, right?

Continue readingAmerican Farmers Encounter Competition, Don’t Like It
Published January 31, 2011

Speculation and Arbitrage on Food Markets

Matt Collin over at Aid Thoughts has a really good post quoting Tim Worstall about arbitrage on food markets:

“OK, so there’s going to be a future shortage of food. That will mean that in the future some people will die from starvation. This is not a desirable outcome.

So, what do we want to happen? We want to pull those future high food prices into the present. Instead of finding out that we’re short 10 million tonnes of grain in 2012 (or 1 million in 2015, or 100 million, whatever and whenever) we’d like people to be aware of this future food shortage. And getting lots of people to do two things.

1) Among consumers, we want people to substitute away from the foods that will be in short supply. Eat potatoes, or polenta, instead of bread or pasta. Cassava instead of rice. We also want people to be a bit more careful about the food they buy: not waste so much of it. A high price now does this.

2) We want farmers to plant more land, also to farm more intensively so they get a larger crop from each acre they do plant. A bit more weeding, a tad more fertilser, this sort of thing. A high price now makes this happen.

So, we want high prices now to reduce consumption and increase production so that we don’t in fact run out of food in the future.

So that people don’t starve to death, right?”

Unfortunately, one of the commenters on the post linked above, who writes under the name Liam, is completely mistaken about the impact of food price volatility when he writes:

“A key question with speculation has to be its affect on volatility. In terms of food prices, volatility is I think the thing everyone can agree on is bad (since both high and low food prices are good for some people).”

I interpret this as a sign that policy makers and the general public are ready for our findings on food price volatility.

(HT: Ryan Briggs via Twitter.)

Published October 25, 2021

Producers, Consumers, and Value Chains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

For the past year, Jeff Bloem, Sunghun Lim, and I have been hard at work on a chapter for the forthcoming volume 6 of the Elsevier-North Holland Handbook of Agricultural Economics on agricultural value chains in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). We finally managed to finish writing a draft of it, and so I thought of posting it here. I apologize in advance for any oversight on our part. Given the comprehensive nature of those chapters, and given our blind spots, and given that this is not the pre-print version and that it will be going out to reviewers for comments, we welcome any and all comments if you have them.

Here is the abstract:

We present an overview of the literature on agri-food value chains in low- and middle-income countries. Starting from farmers’ decision of whether to move away from subsistence agriculture to participate in agri-food value chains, we study the process whereby agricultural commodities make their way from the farm-gate to the final consumer, documenting the procurement relationships that arise and the organization of markets at every step of the way. In each step, we take stock of the empirical evidence, critically assess the research so far, and offer a number of directions for future research. We further discuss the challenges and opportunities for global agri-food value chains.

Writing one of these chapters is a lot of work, especially right on the heels of writing a book. Given that, I expect I will be going back to writing plain-old articles for the foreseeable future.

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