International Targets for Poverty Reduction and Food Security: A Mildly Sceptical But Resolutely Pragmatic View With a Call for Greater Subsidiarity

Summaries International development targets adopted by UN Conferences provide political impetus, focus expenditure and help in monitoring progress. However, simple targets can misrepresent complex realities and distort policy. Monitoring targets can have a high opportunity cost. Political impetus can be lost if targets are over?ambitious. Food security illustrates the uses of targets and the risks involved. Simple hunger or nutrition targets have been attractive to policymakers but have been problematic conceptually, and routinely overambitious in practice. Greater subsidiarity may be the answer, with simple international targets being used as a platform for local action. Subsidiarity means more than developing national action plans to implement international targets: it is potentially more open, participatory subversive and deviant

Getting real about food prices

The 2008 price spike in world grain prices had serious impacts on food security and poverty but analysts have consistently described these real food prices as low in historical terms. The inconsistency between the severity of the food crisis and low real prices results from the use of advanced and global economy price indices to calculate real prices. This ignores the high share of food in poor people’s expenditures and indirect effects of income growth on expenditure patterns of rich and poor consumers. Poor consumers have not experienced the same falls in real food prices as those with growing incomes and are more vulnerable to price shocks. As high and fluctuating international grain prices appear to be a feature of the current world economy, food price and policy analysis must recognise this, and develop and use different price indices that take account of differences between consumer groups

Food, Nutrition and Agrobiodiversity Under Global Climate Change

Available evidence and predictions suggest overall negative effects on agricultural production as a result of climate change, especially when more food is required by a growing population. Information on the effects of global warming on pests and pathogens affecting agricultural crops is limited, though crop–pest models could offer means to predict changes in pest dynamics, and help design sound plant health management practices. Host-plant resistance should continue to receive high priority as global warming may favor emergence of new pest epidemics. There is increased risk, due to climate change, to food and feed contaminated by mycotoxin-producing fungi. Mycotoxin biosynthesis gene-specific microarray is being used to identify food-born fungi and associated mycotoxins, and investigate the influence of environmental parameters and their interactions for control of mycotoxin in food crops. Some crop wild relatives are threatened plant species and efforts should be made for their in situ conservation to ensure evolution of new variants, which may contribute to addressing new challenges to agricultural production. There should be more emphasis on germplasm enhancement to develop intermediate products with specific characteristics to support plant breeding. Abiotic stress response is routinely dissected to component physiological traits. Use of transgene(s) has led to the development of transgenic events, which could provide enhanced adaptation to abiotic stresses that are exacerbated by climate change. Global warming is also associated with declining nutritional quality of food crops. Micronutrient-dense cultivars have been released in selected areas of the developing world, while various nutritionally enhanced lines are in the release pipeline. The high-throughput phenomic platforms are allowing researchers to accurately measure plant growth and development, analyze nutritional traits, and assess response to stresses on large sets of individuals. Analogs for tomorrow’s agriculture offer a virtual natural laboratory to innovate and test technological options to develop climate resilience production systems. Increased use of agrobiodiversity is crucial to coping with adverse impacts of global warming on food and feed production and quality. No one solution will suffice to adapt to climate change and its variability. Suits of technological innovations, including climate-resilient crop cultivars, will be needed to feed 9 billion people who will be living in the Earth by the middle of the twenty-first century

Foreign Aid, Fertility and Human Capital Accumulation

This paper analyses the effect of foreign aid on population growth and human capital accumulation. Consistent with empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa, the model shows that foreign aid can work against its stated goal of alleviating poverty and promoting growth. Humanitarian aid fosters population growth and adversely affects the recipients' incentive to invest in human capital. The analysis suggests that foreign aid may lock a recipient economy in a low-equilibrium trap. Copyright (c) The London School of Economics and Political Science 2008.