Event Date: May 20, 2011
Time: 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM (GMT -5)
Location:
Ronald Reagan Building
1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW, Room M17/18
Washington, District of Columbia, 20004, United States
Event Links: Tschirley Screencast
Information
Rapid progress is being made in designing and launching Feed the Future programs amid significant budgetary and world commodity market changes. What can be done to ensure that these programs meet Feed the Future objectives and have significant impact in the countries concerned? How can the recent return of high commodity prices in world markets be addressed successfully? Can helpful lessons be drawn from the experience of price increases during 2007 to 2008? This symposium included presentations and discussion in response to these questions.
The event featured presentations by senior professors from the Michigan State University Food Security III Cooperative Agreement. Thomas Jayne presented "What Kinds of Agricultural Strategies Lead to Broad-based Growth? Strategies for FTF," and David Tschirley presented, "Do’s and Don’ts of Managing Food Price Spikes in Countries with Food Insecure Populations." The focus of these presentations was on practical lessons drawn from country-level and cross-country research and policy dialogue activities carried out by MSU’s Food Security III team and their in-country colleagues.
Poverty Reduction and Food Security Despite High Food Price Volatility
Thomas Jayne is Professor, International Development, in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics and a member of the Core Faculty of the African Studies Center at Michigan State University. Jayne’s... more professional career has been devoted to promoting effective policy responses to poverty and hunger in Africa. He is involved in research, outreach, and capacity building programs in collaboration with African universities and government agencies, mainly focusing on food marketing and trade policies and their effects on sustainable and equitable development. Jayne’s secondary research focus has been on measuring the current and long-term effects of HIV/AIDS on African agriculture. Jayne sits on the editorial boards of two development journals, received a top paper award in 2004 by the International Association of Agricultural Economists, co-authored a paper (with graduate student Jacob Ricker-Gilbert) awarded the T.W. Schultz Award at the 2009 International Association of Agricultural Economists Triennial Meetings, and received the 2009 Best Article Award in Agricultural Economics (with co-authors Xhying Xu, William Burke, and Jones Govereh). Jayne’s work has also been recognized at the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome and the Secretariat of Global Agricultural Science Policy for the Twenty-First Century. less
David Tschirley is Professor, International Development in the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics at Michigan State University and a member of MSU’s Food Security Group. Dr. Tschirley works... more extensively on two broad sets of issues. His research on high value food crops in Africa has focused on cotton and fresh produce. Dr. Tschirley’s work with colleagues on cotton, covering much of the continent, has highlighted the context-specific nature of the approach to and results from sectoral reforms begun in the 1990s, as well as the centrality of institutional design in ensuring desirable outcomes. Research on fresh produce systems has focused on East and Southern Africa, highlighting the continued dominance and documenting the performance of so-called “traditional” marketing systems and arguing for the necessity of sustained and informed investments in these systems, especially at wholesale. An emerging focus is on the environmental and human health implications of intensified fresh produce production for rapidly growing African cities. Dr. Tschirley’s second main area of work focuses on the interface of food crises and food markets. He has published on food aid monetization, local and regional food aid procurement, and the logic of dysfunctional government response to food emergencies in southern Africa. Dr. Tschirley is currently a member of the World Food Program’s P4P (Purchase for Progress) Technical Review Panel. less
Comments
Hi, Tim. This is an excellent and important question, in part because you've put it in a dynamic context -- not just what's the current impact on incomes, but how are rural hhs responding now and in terms of potentially longer-term strategies. The difficulty yet in addressing it is in having detailed hh level data sets collected after -- enough after -- the onset of the high prices to start seeing these responses. These data sets will be coming in -- we'll add to our panels in Kenya and Zambia in 2012 -- and I think this kind of dynamic question needs to inform some tweaking that we do of the questionnaires to be sure we can address the question. Thanks for posting thisl
Dave - Thanks for the quick response. A couple organizations including Oxfam did take a look at this issue immediately following the 2007/2008 price crisis. Cambodia and Senegal were tw0 contries they looked at. It was much too soon aftert eh crisis for these studies to get at the broader issues I think you are interested but they might provide you some insight as you move forward with your own research.
Cheers
Tim
i think you should try finger food Brisbane, its very tasty.
Tom J noted that a number of farmers in the Zambia study had very low fertilizer use efficiency ratios. My question is why is this the case. Three possibilites come to mind. One is that the low efficiency of fertilizer use is due to the fact that these farmers are not using improved seeds; a second possibility is that the agronomic practices of these farmers are inferior to those who have higher efficiency ratios; and the last is that the soils these farmers are working are much more depleted than the soils of their neighbors. Does Tom have any preliminary findings from this study that might provide more information on this issue?
Thanks
Tim
Dear Tim,
The slide on kgs of maize per kgs of nitrogen were derived after controlling for seed type and other inputs. All of the farms in the analysis were from Zambia's Natural Region II where Acrisols are the primary soil type. So, for the most part, the variations in fertilizer use efficiency must come from differences in management practices and know-how. To some extent, there are also some soil quality differences even within this dominant Acrisols region. I included this slide to demonstrate the potential importance of good extension services to help the less knowledgeable farmers. If the bottom half of the farmers were able to raise their fertilizer use efficiency to the mean level (i.e., 16kgs maize per kg N), then national maize production in Zambia would have increased by 8% -- with no additional use of input.
Regards,
Thom
if you speak about USA, you get good finger food from Houston food delivery as well.
poverty these days is becoming a big problem especially in other countries but even our own country can't get away with it. According to a recently released Pew Charitable Trusts study, the middle class is falling down. Downward mobility is on the menu, as one out of every three Americans who were raised in middle class loses their rank and slip down as soon as they're adults. Source for this article: One in three Americans are losing middle-class status
It's very alarming how poverty rates increase from time to time and from country to country. All over the world, we can obviously notice how many people suffer from high food prices and other basic needs. Anyway, if you are in need of legal assistance to deal with personal injury and car accident cases, you can seek for help from a Miami Car accident attorney.
Is there any data on the impact of food price increases on rural economies. For some time now, we have read about a hollowing out of rural economeis as younger people migrated to the cities in search of work. Higher food prices mean that returns for agriculture are likely to be up and the economic prospects of farming much brighter than they have been in the past. So my question is, are the higher food prices changing the the livelihood strategies of rural famillies who now see the possibility for improving their well being through increased farm investments (both captial and labor)?