Food and financial crises: Implications for agriculture and the poor

"High food prices from 2007 through mid-2008 had serious implications for food and nutrition security, macroeconomic stability, and political security. The unfolding global financial crisis and economic slowdown have now pushed food prices to lower levels. Yet the financial crunch has also decreased the availability of capital at a time when accelerated investment in agriculture is urgently needed. The food and financial crises will have strong and long-lasting effects on emerging economies and poor people. A synchronized response is needed to ease the burden on the poor and allow agriculture to face new challenges and respond to new opportunities. Three sets of complementary policy actions should be taken: (1) promote pro-poor agricultural growth, (2) reduce market volatility, and (3) expand social protection and child nutrition action. Agriculture requires strategic investment action, and the food-insecure poor need a bailout now." from Textfood security, Nutrition security, Pro-poor growth, Agricultural growth, Food prices, Social protection, Global financial crises,

The world food situation: New driving forces and required actions

"The world food situation is currently being rapidly redefined by new driving forces. Income growth, climate change, high energy prices, globalization, and urbanization are transforming food consumption, production, and markets. The influence of the private sector in the world food system, especially the leverage of food retailers, is also rapidly increasing. Changes in food availability, rising commodity prices, and new producer–consumer linkages have crucial implications for the livelihoods of poor and food-insecure people. Analyzing and interpreting recent trends and emerging challenges in the world food situation is essential in order to provide policymakers with the necessary information to mobilize adequate responses at the local, national, regional, and international levels. It is also critical for helping to appropriately adjust research agendas in agriculture, nutrition, and health. Not surprisingly, renewed global attention is being given to the role of agriculture and food in development policy, as can be seen from the World Bank's World Development Report, accelerated public action in African agriculture under the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), and the Asian Development Bank's recent initiatives for more investment in agriculture, to name just a few examples." from TextWorld food situation, Globalization, food security, Agricultural production, Markets, Food prices,

Semiclassical spin damping: Superradiance revisited

A well known description of superradiance from pointlike collections of many atoms involves the dissipative motion of a large spin. The pertinent ``superradiance master equation'' allows for a formally exact solution which we subject to a semiclassical evaluation. The clue is a saddle-point approximation for an inverse Laplace transform. All previous approximate treatments, disparate as they may appear, are encompassed in our systematic formulation. A byproduct is a hitherto unknown rigorous relation between coherences and probabilities. Our results allow for generalizations to spin dynamics with chaos in the classical limit.Comment: 12 pages standard revtex; to be published in EPJ

Physical and virtual global food reserves to protect the poor and prevent market failure:

"The current food crisis has several causes—rising demand for food and feed, biofuels, high oil prices, climate change, stagnant agricultural productivity growth—but there is increasing evidence that the crisis is being made worse by the malfunctioning of world grain markets. Given the thinness of major markets for cereals, the restrictions on grain exports imposed by dozens of countries have resulted in additional price increases. A number of countries have adopted retail price controls, creating perverse incentives for producers. Speculative bubbles have built up, and the gap between cash and futures prices has risen, stimulating overregulation in some countries and causing some commodity exchanges in Africa and Asia to halt grain futures trading. Some food aid donors have defaulted on food aid contracts. The World Food Programme (WFP) has had difficulty getting quick access to grain for its humanitarian operations. Developing countries are urgently rebuilding their national stocks and re-examining the “merits” of self-sufficiency policies for food security despite high costs. These reactions began as consequences, not causes, of the price crisis, but they exacerbate the crisis and increase the risks posed by high prices. By creating a feedback loop with high food prices, they further increase price levels and volatility, with adverse consequences for the poor and for long-term incentives for agricultural production. Because they impede the free flow of food to where it is most needed and undermine the flow of price signals to farmers, these market failures impose enormous efficiency losses on the global food system, hitting the poorest countries and people hardest." from Author's textFood prices, Food policy, Markets,

Time to stop dumping on the world's poor: essay from IFPRI's 2002-2003 Annual Report

What can governments in rich countries do about poverty in poor countries, apart from increasing and improving aid and endorsing ambitious poverty reduction goals? Answer: get serious about reforming their own farm policies and start dismantling the agricultural trade restrictions and subsidies that contribute to mass poverty across the developing world.Globalization, Equality, tariffs, Protectionism, Land tenure, Poverty reduction,

Exploring the Price Spike

Agribusiness, I30, O12, Q18,

Poverty and the globalization of the food and agriculture system:

Poverty reduction, Hunger, Globalization, Food and agriculture, Poverty, Agriculture and trade,

Information and communication technologies for the poor:

This brief is based on Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, ed. Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Johns Hopkins University Press and IFPRI, 2006) "The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in development is unclear, especially without convincing evidence of their impact—and little research has been conducted on the direct and indirect links between ICTs and poverty reduction. A new book, Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press for IFPRI, addresses several pressing questions surrounding ICTs. How do ICTs affect economic development in low-income countries? How do they affect poor people in these countries and in rural areas in particular? What policies and programs facilitate their potential to enhance development and the inclusion of poor constituents? The book presents researchers' findings related to five critical questions. (1) What link exists between ICT growth and economic growth? (2) Do weak institutions block effective use of ICTs? (3) Have ICTs been adapted to low-income countries, and have they had an impact on SMEs? (4) Does household access to ICTs remain constrained? (5) Can ICTs play a role in providing pro-poor public goods and services?" from TextICT, Information technology, Poverty reduction, Development, Telecommunications, Economic development Developing countries, rural areas, Institutions,

Income sources of malnourished people in rural areas: Microlevel information and policy implications

"This research is stimulated by the preliminary insight that rural households, even if they are poor and/or located in so-called subsistence-oriented regions, are dependent on a variety of farm, nonfarm, and nonagricultural income sources. The scale and nature of these income sources and their relationship to the major economic sectors (agriculture, rural manufacturing, and services), through backward and forward linkages, need to be better understood for priority setting in development policy. The objectives of this study are threefold: 1) to identify employment and income sources of rural households of different socioeconomic characteristics in regions and countries at different stages of agricultural transformation and development; 2) to trace income and employment strategies (as revealed by these) of rural households, and, thus, to broaden the information base for policy priorities for integration of the poor into a sustainable growth and development process. 3) to look into distributions below and above the poverty line in order to identify relevant differences in demographic, income, and employment characteristics of poor and nonpoor rural households and, thereby, assess the scope for "targeting" income sources of the poor as a poverty alleviation strategy. Poverty is essentially, but not always, a matter of low incomes, where the cost of acquiring a certain commodity bundle determines the income- or expenditure-based poverty line. An income-based indicator is an indirect means of measuring poverty. In this study, poverty is measured directly through consumption, given certain commodity characteristics and behaviors, rather than in directly through incomes. A central and fundamental characteristic of absolute poverty is insufficient food consumption for an active and healthy life. The poverty line (cutoff point) is defined here by calorie consumption being 80 percent of the recommended consumption for an active and healthy life." from authors' abstractRural poor Developing countries., Income Developing countries., Rural poor Developing countries Nutrition., Malnutrition Developing countries.,

The promises and challenges of biofuels for the poor in developing countries: IFPRI 2005-2006 Annual Report Essay

"In the past several years the changing world energy situation has generated intensive discussion about biofuels, much of it promising a source of environment-friendly energy that would also be a boon to the world's farmers. At the same time skeptics argue that biofuel production will threaten food supplies for the poor and fail to achieve the environmental benefits claimed. Based on the analyses below, we conclude that in order to make a difference in the lives of poor people as both energy producers and consumers, and to make strong environmental and economic contributions, biofuel technology needs further advancement, and investments and policies facilitating agricultural innovation and trade will have to be considered." from TextBiofuels, Poor Developing countries, Small farmers,