Poverty Reduction and Food Security Despite High Food Price Volatility
Event 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.
Speakers
Thomas Jayne
Michigan State University
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 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.
David Tschirley
Michigan State University
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 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.