Tag: food security

Necessary adjustments – but quant and qual still meet

The other day, I posted about the convergence between my own qualitative findings on the food security outcomes of food price instability and those of Marc Bellemare, Chris Barrett and David Just: that, at least in various parts of Africa, such instability was most likely to impact the middle and upper income cohorts more than the lower income cohorts of a given population.  However, I jumped too quickly in assuming that their dataset included rural and urban households – as Marc pointed out on his blog, they used a panel of rural household surveys.  So my initial argument about convergence does not hold up, as they did not consider the urban context in their work.
This is not to say that I am backing away from my assessment of the vulnerabilities of urban populations to this sort of challenge – I stand by it, having seen it, if only anecdotally, in towns and cities in Ghana over the past 13 years.  Urban populations are generally much more dependent on markets for their food supply than those living in rural areas (though this is not always true), and therefore price instability does create significant livelihoods uncertainty that is very difficult to manage, especially for the urban poor.  I therefore stand by my argument that we need to be keeping a close eye on the relative impact of price volatility on urban and rural populations, as the impacts of such volatility is likely to have very different impacts on these groups.
But recognizing that Bellemare et al’s work only addresses rural outcomes is not a problem for my argument about what I am loosely calling temporary deglobalization as a strategy for managing price instability (and price increases) – indeed, I think it strengthens the argument because it means that their dataset is now commensurate with mine, which was also rural.  As I argued in an extended comment on Marc’s blog:

The rural farmers most hit by price instability are those most integrated with global markets – the ones least able to deglobalize, as it were, when things get uncertain . . . Meanwhile, the bottom 60% is not as engaged with markets in which price volatility matters, and therefore can back away from them in terms of how they use their crops. In my work in Ghana, I found very few true cash crops (in the area I was working). Instead, some crops were treated like “cash crops” in years where price conditions and farm outputs of staple crops were favorable, and as staple crops when either prices were not favorable (including periods of volatility) or outputs of other staples used for subsistence were not adequate to meet household food needs. (Note: in many cases, the treatment of a crop as “cash” or “staple/subsistence” was highly gendered as well). The real difference between the rich and poor (relative terms in the Ghana sample) is the overall livelihoods strategy – one strategy (seen among the wealthier) is much, much more engaged in production for local markets, while the other (seen among the poorer) hedged market production with significant subsistence production (again, highly gendered). In years of volatility (or really in the face of most shocks), the market-oriented livelihoods were simply less resilient than the more diversified livelihoods strategies of the poorer households.

Or, as Marc himself noted in his response to my post on his blog:

[The wealthier] households tend to be hurt by price volatility because they are producers and therefore net sellers of most of (if not all) the seven commodities retained for analysis (i.e., coffee, maize, beans, wheat, teff, barley, sorghum).

So this means that the “temporary deglobalization” argument is not merely a rural-versus-urban argument, but one that can separate households in the same rural community.  This, I think, strengthens one of the arguments I was making in my original post:

  • Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.
Posted on by Ed 1

Where Quant and Qual meet: On speculation, price instability and food insecurity

UPDATE: Marc Bellemare pointed out some issues with this post, which I have addressed here.  These issues, though, strengthen the argument about strategic deglobalization . . .

§§§§§§

There have been an interesting series of blog posts going around about the issue of price speculation in food markets, and the impact of that speculation on food security and people’s welfare.  Going back through some of these exchanges, it seems to me that a number of folks are arguing past one another.
The most recent discussion was spurred by a post on the Guardian’s Global Development blog by John Vidal that took on the issue of speculation in food markets.  In the post, Vidal argues that food speculation is a key driver of price instability on global food markets, which results in serious impacts for the poorest people in the world – a sort of famine profiteering, as it were.
The weakness of this post, as I see it, are twofold.  First, it doesn’t take the issue of price arbitrage seriously – that is, how speculation is supposed to function.  Aid Thoughts, via one of the comments on Vidal’s post, takes Vidal to task for this.  As Aid Thoughts/the commenter point out, the idea behind speculation is to pull future price impacts of shortage into the present, stimulating responses to future shortages before they occur.  Thus, a blanket condemnation of speculation makes very little sense from the perspective of one who wants to see food security enhanced around the world – without speculation, there will be no market signal for future shortage, creating a world that addresses shortages in a reactive instead of proactive manner. This is a completely fair critique of Vidal, I think.
However, neither Vidal nor those responding to him actually address the evidence for significant market manipulation, and the intentional generation of instability for the purposes of profiteering.  This evidence first emerged in a somewhat anecdotal manner in Fredrick Kaufman’s “The Food Bubble: How Wall Street starved millions and got away with it.”  In this article, Kaufman uses a fairly limited number of informants to lay out a case for the intentional manipulation of wheat markets in 2008.  It is an interesting read, though I argued in an earlier post that it suffers from trying to be a parable for the pervasive presence of complex investment vehicles in the modern world.  And in the end, its findings can hardly be called robust.
Though Kaufman’s argument might, by itself, be less than robust, it received a serious empirical boost from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in the fall of 2010.  In a discussion paper that remains underreported and under-considered in food security circles (trust me, it is difficult to get anyone to even talk about speculation in program settings), Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles demonstrate quantitatively that the dramatic price rises for food in 2008 is best explained by various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets.  Now, we can argue about how large an impact that activity had on actual prices, but it seems to me that Cooke and Robles, when taken in concert with the Kaufman piece, have demonstrated that the speculation we see in the markets right now is not merely a normal market response to potential future shortage – indeed, the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has been arguing for months that there are no likely supply issues that should be triggering the price increases we see.  In other words, while it is foolish to simply blame price arbitrage for food insecurity, it is equally blind to assume that all of those practicing such arbitrage are doing so in the manner prescribed in the textbooks.  Someone will always try to game the system, and in tightly connected markets, a few efforts to game a market can have radiating impacts that draw in honest arbitrage efforts.  There is need for regulatory oversight.  But regulation will not solve all our food problems.
But this all leaves one last question unanswered: what is the impact of price instability, whether caused by actual likely future shortages or by efforts to game markets for short-term profits, on the welfare of the poor?  Vidal, Kaufman and many others assume that the impacts are severe.  Well, maybe.  You see, where matters (again – yep, I’m a geographer).  In a very interesting paper, Marc Bellemare (along with Chris Barrett and David Just) demonstrates that, at least in Ethiopia:

contrary to conventional wisdom, the welfare gains from eliminating price volatility would be concentrated in the upper 40 percent of the income distribution, making food price stabilization a distributionally regressive policy in this context.

This finding may be a shock to those working in aid at first glance, but this finding is actually intuitive.  In fact, in my book (out tomorrow!) I lay out a qualitative picture of livelihoods in rural Ghana that aligns perfectly with this finding.  In Bellemare et al, I would bet my house that the upper 40% of the population is that segment of the population living in urban areas and/or wealthy enough to be purchasing large amounts of processed food.  Why does this matter?  This is the segment of the population that typically has the most limited options when food prices begin to get unstable.  On the other hand, the bottom 60% of the population, especially those in this cohort living in rural areas (it is unclear from the study how much of an overlap between poor and rural there is in the sample, but I am betting it is pretty high), has a much more limited engagement with global food markets.  As a result, when food prices begin to spike, they have the ability to effect a temporary partial, or even complete, disengagement from the global market.  In other words, much as I saw in Ghana, this study seems to suggest that temporary deglobalization is a coping strategy that at least some people in Ethiopia use to guard against the vagaries of markets.  Ironically, those best positioned to effect such a strategy are the poorest, and therefore they are better able to manage the impact of price instability on food markets.
In short, I would argue that Marc’s (and his co-authors’) work is a quantitative empirical demonstration of one of my core arguments in Delivering Development:

2. At globalization’s shoreline the experience of “development” is often negative. The integration of local economies, politics, and society into global networks is not the unmitigated boon to human well- being presented by many authors. Those living along the shores of globalization deal with significant challenges in their lives, such as degrading environments, social inequality that limits opportunity for significant portions of society, and inadequate medical care. The integration of these places into a global economy does not necessarily solve these problems. In the best cases such integration provides new sources of income that might be used to address some of these challenges. In nearly all cases, however, such integration also brings new challenges and uncertainties that come at a cost to people’s incomes and well- being. (pp.14-15)

I’m not suggesting Marc endorses this claim – hell, for all I know he’ll start throwing things when he sees it.  But there is an interesting convergence happening here.  I’m glad I met Marc at a tweet-up in DC a few weeks ago.  We’re going to have to talk some more . . . I see the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
In summary, while efforts to game global food markets do exist, and have very serious impacts on at least some people, they do not crush everyone in the Global South.  Instead, this instability will be most felt by those in urban areas – in the form of a disaffected middle and upper class, and a large cohort of the urban poor who, lacking alternative food sources, might be pushed over the brink by price increases.  The policy implications are clear:

  • We need to be watching the impact of price increases on urban food insecurity more than rural insecurity
  • Demanding that rural producers orient themselves toward greater and greater integration with global markets in the absence of robust fallback measures (such as established, transparent microinsurance and microsavings initiatives) will likely extend the impact of future price instability further into the poorest populations.
  • We need to better understand the scope of artificially-generated instability and uncertainty in global food markets, and establish means of identifying and regulating this activity without closing price arbitrage down entirely.
Posted on by Ed 9

Don't tell us the food price index is rising! Tell us why . . .

The rising price of food has been a subject of many news stories over the past few months, with the intensity of attention ratcheting up recently upon news that the FAO’s food price index has just surpassed its 2008 peak.  Stories about this issue – well, at least the good stories – point out the highly variable way in which this increase in the price of food has played out in different places.  One good example of this sort of reportage is from Saturday’s Washington Post.
This variability, however, tends to be illustrated instead of interrogated, with explanations remaining remarkably shallow (see my earlier complaints about how explanations related to “local specificity” and “cultural difference” tend to obscure important processes and blame the victims of larger processes).  However, a quick examination of the information we have about food prices and their impacts points to the fact that global food prices are not all that useful for understanding the variable food outcomes we see in the Global South.  First, we have to understand that the increase everyone is talking about is in an index of food prices – that is, the price data drawn from a number of different foods.  Though the index is going up, this does not mean that the prices of all foods are rising equally.  As the WaPo and others have noted (and is quite clear in the FAO presentation of the data), when you disaggregate the crops and their prices, the biggest increases globally are in sugar, cooking oils and some fats (there are, of course, local surges in price for particular crops, but those are often independent of the larger global markets).  While cereal prices are increasing, they are not rising as quickly as these other foods, and they remain below 2008 levels.  So who is hit by these prices has a lot to do with who consumes sugar, or products heavily constituted by sugar and oils.  Oils are widely distributed in diets, but sugar is not – the poorest tend to have the least access outside the Global North (ironically, this is reversed in the Global North, as noted by Fast Food Nation and Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me).  Meanwhile, staple crop prices are not rising anywhere near as rapidly.  So the principal drivers of the rising price index are not a huge portion of the diets of those in Global South . . . with one key exception: urban populations.  More on that in a second.
Second, who is hit by these prices has to do with the degree to which producers and consumers are linked to global markets.  Many rural producers are consumers of their own produce, or the produce of their neighbors.  As a result, they are somewhat insulated from shifts in commodity prices.  I’ve seen this at work in Ghana firsthand – it is a disaster for incomes in these areas, but not for food security.  Instead, people just eat the crops they might otherwise have sold at market.  Of course, this comes with other costs, such as in terms of the purchases of needed household goods, and sometimes in terms of children’s education (in places where school fees are still charged).  But in terms of food security, not so much.  FEWS-NET has offered this same interpretation of the impact of rising food prices on the countries in which it operates, arguing that this increase in this index is not as worrying as what we saw in 2008.  This is one of those instances where integration with global markets, long seen as a goal of development programs and a clear pathway to prosperity, can also produce significant new challenges for the global poor . . . or at least that segment of the rural poor whose livelihoods and production are highly integrated with global markets.
So, where people are dependent on global commodities that are internationally sourced for their food or incomes, shifting global food prices are more likely to result in direct shocks to their food security.  While there are certainly rural populations that fit this description, once again it is the urban poor who are most generally and directly exposed to this challenge.  With little food production of their own, they are dependent on purchased food that has passed through one or more middlemen from the source of production.  By definition, their food supply is more commodified, and more connected to global markets, than most of their rural counterparts.
Therefore, there isn’t a whole lot of point to looking at global price indexes to understand the relationship between these prices and food insecurity.  Instead, we have to look at who is affected by these prices, and how – the connections are complex and often involve tracing what appear to be unrelated factors as they radiate out from these price changes.  This is the only way to appropriately design interventions to address these issues . . .
Don’t tell us that the food price index is rising – tell us why it is rising . . . then we can do something about it.

Posted on by Ed 1

Where accountability goes to die

The subtle airbrushing of market manipulation out of the public consciousness continues apace.  Despite clear evidence from IFPRI that market manipulation is creating the conditions of uncertainty that are driving up global food prices, nobody seems to want to address this in a forceful manner – and heaven forbid you raise this in any food security discussions in a development agency.  People will blindly argue that there is no evidence (except, of course, there is), and then when confronted with the IFPRI study will make absurd arguments like the uncertainty is creating the appearance of manipulation because, you know, IFPRI wouldn’t bother to make sure they had the causality going in the right direction before they published.*  So, we will just keep plugging away at the issues of supply to address global food issues, because why address the only factor that IFPRI could identify as having a causal effect on the rising food prices in 2008?
And now we see the same blindness spreading into our discussions of the financial markets.  In the January issue of Wired Felix Salmon and Jon Stokes return to the Flash Crash, the sudden near-600 point drop in the Dow that occurred back in May.  The regulatory agencies assigned to policing market manipulation more or less abdicated their responsibilities and absolved everyone of blame in their report.  This was absurd, and doesn’t hold up to the slightest bit of logic.  Now Wired is on board, running a “blame the algorithms” story that uses the flash crash as exhibit A.  They argue that Waddell and Reed (the managers of the mutual fund that made the trade)

used an algorithm to hedge its stock market position.  The trade was executed in just 20 minutes – an extremely aggressive time frame, which triggered a market plunge as other algorithms reacted, first to the sale and then to one another’s behavior

Sure – this is exactly how it played out.  But the issue here is not that the algorithms themselves were to blame.  Someone had the PROGRAM THE ALGORITHM FOR THE FIRST TRADE.  The algorithm did not decide to dump all of those futures contracts in 20 minutes.  The person who designed the algorithm (or, more likely, his/her employer) made that decision.  Once set in motion, I have no doubt that this trade cascaded through other, more conventionally designed algorithms, triggering all sorts of “irrational” behavior as they tried to adjust to the rapidly-changing market conditions.  I also have no doubt that whoever set up the original algorithm had some idea that this is exactly the sort of chaos that would ensure from their insane trade.  Everyone is now focused on events after the initial trade, and how trading algorithms might need more controls or oversight.  I think that is a reasonable position, but it does nothing to address the behavior of individuals willing to initiate market chaos by setting up insane trades.
Incidentally, nobody in their right mind would set up an insane trade for no reason.  I wonder if the SEC spent any time looking into who was short on the Dow that day and made out big (including people who made out huge before a bunch of trades later in the crash were invalidated), and then examined the connections those folks might have had to Waddell and Reed.  Then again, it seems few folks in major development agencies want to seriously examine market manipulation and its impact on food security.
At what point does willful obliviousness turn into criminal negligence?
*these were actual arguments raised when a colleague of mine attempted to address the issue of market manipulation at a meeting in one of our major development agencies.  Really.  How the hell, exactly, does uncertainty create the appearance of manipulation?

Posted on by Ed 0

Hang on, here we go!

Via Resilience Science:
International wheat prices are up 60-80% since July.  And according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), this price increase is not a standard market function – despite some crop failures, “Global cereal supply and demand still appears sufficiently in balance” to have much more stable prices.  So what, pray tell, is driving the increase?  Well, the FAO blames “national policy responses and speculative behaviour.”
Garry at Resilience Science does a great job of covering the obvious rebuttal: “Oh, the FAO is another organization out to demonize markets – this argument isn’t based on evidence.”  Um, not so fast . . . in a discussion paper for the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) – and by the way, the US is a major funder for IFPRI – Bryce Cooke and Miguel Robles appear to have demonstrated quantitatively that various proxies for speculation and activity on futures markets best explain the dramatic price rises for food in 2008.  To quote:

“Overall, we conclude from our time series analysis that when taking the four commodities analyzed here there is evidence that financial activity in futures markets and/or speculation in these markets can help explain the behavior of these prices in recent years. Other explanations are only partially supported for the particular case of one agricultural commodity or not supported at all. We do not claim, however, that these other explanations should be disregarded; all that we can say is that in using the variables considered in this study and the particular time series models herein, we do not find such evidence.”

Well, looks like Frederick Kaufman (see this earlier post) was at least partially right . . . in this case, the futures markets are causing more problems than they are solving.  Put another way, these studies demonstrate empirically that the manipulation of these markets is killing people – literally.  This is not market failure, people.  This is human moral failure.  But we wouldn’t want to regulate those markets, now would we?
Sigh.

Posted on by Ed 5

More on food prices, shortages, and riots

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I’m in orientation for the new position, which just swallows whole days – useful, but a bit exhausting.
So, a quick post following up on my previous comments about food prices. The Guardian has a good piece on this issue at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel
This piece is much better than reporting from US sources, but it does have a significant flaw driven by the political goal of the author – highlighting the failures of economic/development policy and practice, and how this led to our current situation. While I agree that these are major issues, I am concerned with the way the author downplays the fact that there has been simmering discontent with the government in Mozambique for some time. The riots are locally-specific: tied to food markets, development policy and other geopolitical processes, but crystallized into action through a local lens. This is why we have riots in some places, but not others. It’s just too hard to generalize . . . and we don’t learn much when we do, I fear.

Posted on by Ed 0

Why food security analyses fail . . .

Case 1: when you fail to define your basic terms correctly.
Laurie A. Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried to write an interesting piece about climate change and food security recently.  Her case is compelling, though she draws far too heavily on a few high profile examples of possible climate impacts on food supply without providing appropriate caveats about the difference between climate change (a trend over time) and climate variability (which can be one-off events, or the byproduct of a larger trend).  This is somewhat standard fare in the popular media, as such caveats really don’t make for good reading.
What got my attention was Garrett’s complete failure to properly define food security.  She argues “The overwrought phrase “food security” connotes literally obtaining sufficient calories and nutrients to stay alive.”  Well, maybe in 1980.  Since then, a tremendous amount of work (to which I have made a very small contribution) has expanded this definition dramatically – food security is about access and entitlement to food and other livelihoods resources – in other words, food security is more than enough calories on hand – you also have to have rights of access to those calories, or you are out of luck.
Why is this a problem in her article?  Well, Garrett is trying to draw a link between climate change a food prices . . . which are presumed to hit the global poor the hardest.  However, rising prices are only a part of the food security story.  If we don’t know people’s rights of entitlement to the calories they need, then it becomes hard to say if we have enough or not enough food available.
For example, let’s assume that a Ghanaian husband and wife have three children – one girl and two boys.  The household needs, at a basal level around 6000 calories a day to meet basic needs.  We can go to their farm, and measure the food they eat, and get a caloric figure.  Perhaps that figure comes back at 6500 calories per day.  This is not enough to say that this household, and all its members are food secure.  Does the wife and her girl child, have the same rights to food as the husband and boys, or must the females wait for the men to eat their fill, before eating whatever remains?  If the females do not have the same rights of access, it may be that the husband and boys are more than food secure, while the wife and her girls are not.
Certainly, it is useful to know where there simply isn’t any food around – but even this is tricky.  Most people forget that Ethiopia was actually increasing its agricultural exports across its famous mid-1980s famines.  It’s just that the food was sold overseas for foreign currency, which was then used to pay off their national debt . . . as the Ethiopian population starved.
This article addresses but one part of the global food security equation – not enough to make sweeping claims of what is to come.

Posted on by Ed 2

Carbon-neutral consumption? Nah . . .

Well, the markets seem to have faith in biofuels – two companies working on this idea have filed for IPOs in the past week.  Both are interesting, though for different reasons.  Gevo is interesting not for its choice of source material (still using corn, wheat and sugarcane), but for the fact that it is turning these sources into isobutanol, which as Martin LaMonica notes

“can be used as a solvent, blended to make jet fuel or other liquid fuels, or used as a raw material for plastics or rubber.”

Diversifying the products that might come from cellulosic sources is very interesting, and hints at directions we might take toward a post-petroleum world.  The big drawback: they are still stuck using food crops as their source material for fuel.  Elsewhere on this blog I have noted that this sort of sourcing of our fuel has significant ramifications for the global food supply, taking out perhaps too much slack in a time of environmental uncertainty (let alone new economic tools in the commodities markets).
All this makes the other IPO filing, PetroAlgae, much more interesting.  They are working with algae as a source material for their fuel.  Algae doesn’t take up arable land, isn’t one of our current food crops, and can be grown in a wide range of environments.  If they can make this work, we might have something interesting there.
Let’s all remember, though, that biofuels don’t really fix the greenhouse problems our current development pathways are generating.  At best, biofuels are carbon neutral – carbon goes into the plant, is released when plant is converted to energy, rinse, repeat).  However, to get the plant to a state that works as a fuel requires energy – that energy has to come from somewhere, and therefore has a carbon footprint.  So biofuels may not be as bad as coal, but completely clean they are not.  The days of the guilt-free consumption of carbon-neutral goods derived from algae are not yet here . . .
Advanced biofuels maker Gevo files to go public via CNET
Algae fuel maker PetroAlgae files to go public via CNET

Posted on by Ed 0

Development is not the same thing as adaptation

One of the most interesting and distressing trends in recent development thought has been the convergence of adaptation to global change (I use global change as a catch-all which includes environmental and economic change) and development.  Development agencies increasingly take on the idea of adaptation as a key component of their missions – which they should, if they intend to build projects with enduring value.  However, it is one thing to incorporate the idea of adaptation into development programming.  It is entirely another to collapse the two into the same mission.
Simply put, development and adaptation have two different goals.  In general, development is about improving the conditions of life for the global poor in some form or other.  Adaptation implicitly suggests an effort to maintain what exists without letting it get worse . . . which sounds great until you think about the conditions of life in places like rural sub-Saharan Africa, where things are often very bad right now.  A colleague of mine at USAID, in the context of a conversation about disaster relief and development, said it best: the mandate of disaster relief is to put things back to the way they were before the disaster.  In a place like Haiti, that isn’t much of a mandate.
All of this becomes pretty self-evident after a moment of thought.  Why, then, do we see the collapse of these two efforts into a single program in the world of development practice?  For example, what does it mean when food security projects and programs start to define themselves in terms of adaptation?  It seems to me that the goal shifts for these programs – from improvement to the maintenance of existing situations.  If a development agency was there in the first place, the existing situation is likely unacceptable.  To me, this means that this subtle shift in mission is also unacceptable.
Why am I going on about this?  I am about to take up a job as the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for USAID’s Bureau of Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.  In this job, I will have to negotiate this very convergence at the program level.  How we work out this convergence over the next few years will have tremendous implications for development efforts for decades to come – and therefore huge implications for billions of people around the world.  And I don’t pretend to have all the answers . . . but I will think out loud in this space as we go.

Posted on by Ed 5

The food bubble?

Frederick Kaufman has a very interesting piece (subscription required) on an underreported phenomena in the 2008 spike in food prices – what he calls a “food bubble” caused by commodities investment vehicles structured around wheat futures.
While I think this article is worth reading and considering carefully, it is important to recall that Kaufman is trying to make a particular point about the pervasiveness of problematic investment vehicles in our economy, and the ways in which these vehicles seem to hurt everyone but the people who invent them.  This point is well-made.  However, in making this point Kaufman underplays a couple of really important points:
1) Wheat is but one of the staples that saw a price spike in 2008.  And while price stress on one staple (wheat) can lead people to start shifting into another (corn), driving the prices of the second commodity up, it would take some serious research to substantiate the (implicit) idea that a price spike in wheat could have a dramatic impact on corn prices in Africa (where wheat is the 8th most important crop, at 3.2% of total agricultural production) (via FAOSTAT).  Wheat is important, but maize is the crop that links the world together . . . which leads to my second point:
2) There was a convergence of factors that created the price spike in 2008.  In one sentence, Kaufman acknowledges several important factors:
“By the time the normal buying season began, drought had hit Australia, floods had inundated northern Europe, and a vogue for biofuels had enticed U.S. farmers to grow less wheat and more corn.”
But this is only one sentence in the whole article.  In an effort to point out the impact of investment vehicles on global food security, Kaufman’s narrative underplays just how important these other factors were in driving up the price of other staples like corn (the extra corn was largely rerouted to biofuels, and the drought in Australia removed a great deal of expected production from the world supply).
The point here: food insecurity is enormously complex, and caused by the intersection of processes and events operating at multiple scales.  Even as we tease out some of these processes and events, we must also highlight how each specific process or event intersects with other causes to produce particular outcomes in particular places.

Posted on by Ed 9