Fewer Farms, Larger Farms

Right now, the world is in the midst of a food crisis. Some might contend that we never fully recovered from the food crisis of 2008, but what is certain is that food prices are rising. The reason for the spike is open for debate, but some combination of a growing demand due to population growth, an increase in the frequency of extreme weather events (floods in Pakistan, the Moscow heatwave, etc.), an expanding middle class with a growing taste for meat and dairy, global trade policy, commodity speculation, agribusiness lobbying, ethanol, and many other factors is likely. The success of the Green Revolution beginning in the 1960’s caused food prices to fall year after year for decades. With the world assuming that the food problem had been solved, the limited number of development dollars went to researching other global problems, namely solving public health issues like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.

 
Global warming was another issue. Over the last two decades, economists and climatologists have been contemplating the effects of global warming on food production. The consensus was that, while climate change and the corresponding shift in weather patterns would have an adverse impact on agriculture in certain regions of the world, a rising temperature could actually open up new pockets of arable land. The one bright spot of climate change was that the increased amount of carbon in the atmosphere would actually improve crop yields. Unfortunately, that hypothesis proved to be overstated, at best, and quite possibly downright wrong. It turns out that a warmer world, despite what the computer models may say, is not good for food production.
 

The Economist recently had a special report on the feeding the world. The articles were thought-provoking and alarming, and should galvanize a stronger response from the developed world. As food prices increase, the people who are hit the hardest are those spending the highest percentage of their annual income on food. So, for a person of the developed world, a dramatic increase in the price of maize is less apparent on his grocery bill than it is for the rural farmer who is spending 60% of his income on maize. For this reason, the 2008 food price crisis led to riots in some countries and was hardly acknowledged in others. For the 100 million people driven into extreme poverty as a result of the spike in staple crop prices, the prospect of another food crisis in 2011 is likely terrifying, particularly if they understand the challenges in feeding nine billion people over the next half-century.

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Does Per Capita GDP Mean Anything?

There are various ways to measure the level of a country’s development. Choosing the right methodology for quantifying economic status is critical for thinking about the problem of poverty effectively. On a macroeconomic level, the most common indicator is per capita GDP. But I am not sure if per capita GDP is really a good measuring stick for the relative prosperity of a country. The statistic is used as a proxy for development, without taking into consideration the relative concentration of wealth.

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The Sheer Awesomeness of Adventure Tourism

Yes, elephants are - and should be - a commodity. Photograph by Eric Isselee.Several years ago, before I traveled across the Pacific Ocean to explore Japan, I considered becoming an economics professor, wrote an article on space tourism which appeared in the Duke Journal of Economics, applied for a Fulbright Grant to study economics in the Tanzanian bush, was rejected, and realized a future as an economics professor wasn't meant to be.  But in the process I did almost a year's worth of research into the various forms of tourism and the capacity of tourism revenues to provide economic incentives for conservation in places like East Africa.  I'm still convinced that my project would have established tourism as both an environmental panacea and the key to East African development.

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The Catholic Church: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I'm proud to be a Catholic.  While Protestants were busy reading the Bible, addressing each other as "Goody", building barns, and milking cows, my religious ancestors were hunting down witches and heretics and setting them on fire, writing books about damning people to Hell and following through by actually damning them to hell, devising complex codes and secret societies to keep losers at bay, invading an entire region of the globe in search for a magic cup, building labyrinths, burning surviving classical texts, improving torture techniques, trying to keep a dead language alive, and otherwise founding Western civilization.  But to really appreciate how cool Catholicism is when compared to Protestantism, one need only compare Gregorian Chant to Creed.

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Black Gold and the Law of Large Numbers

This afternoon I watched the 2006 coffee trade documentary "Black Gold" for the first time and learned some things, like, for instance, in terms of trade volume among commodities, coffee is exceeded by only oil, and that the eco-friendly fair-trade image cast by Starbucks and other chain coffee shops is only a veneer.  The film follows a group of Ethiopian coffee growers and is harshly critical of the World Trade Organization, which it claims keeps the world price of coffee artificially low to benefit the four major middlemen (Sara Lee, Proctor and Gamble, Kraft, and Nestle) as well as consumers in rich countries.  "Black Gold" criticizes foreign aid for Africa as a poor substitute for extending an appropriate share of the profits generated by coffee sales and those of other commodities to the poor Africans that produce them. 

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