1/4/2023 0 Comments Link to the past openin![]() ![]() Food prices rose steadily, but food shortages were localized and tended to occur in regions facing civil conflict. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted global food supply chains along with most other economic activities. The lesson was learned among Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders-don’t panic, and build up rice reserves. Not a ton of the Japanese-owned rice was ever exported, and world rice prices have remained relatively stable ever since. Within a month, rice prices returned to normal levels as farmers, traders, shopkeepers and international rice brokers realized they were sitting on very expensive rice hoards that had suddenly lost half their value. and Thai long-grain rice to the Philippines, which was desperately seeking rice imports (“at any price.”) In the midst of what was obviously speculative panic in national and global markets, the announcement by the Japanese Prime Minister in June, 2008, that his government would start negotiations with the Philippines to export this rice caused the bubble to burst. government to persuade a reluctant Japanese government to sell its unwanted, imported “WTO rice stocks” of high-quality U.S. In 2008, my colleague Tom Slayton and I helped persuade the U.S. ![]() I helped prevent a rice crisis in 1996 by showing the need for outside rice supplies for Indonesia after its Food Logistics Agency (BULOG) failed to keep track of rice stocks in a rush to get rid of earlier rice surpluses. I helped the Indonesian government navigate the world food crisis from 1972 to 1974, when Thailand literally shut down the world rice market by banning rice exports. I watched the impact of back-to-back monsoon failures in India in 19, while I was a graduate student at Harvard. In over half a century of observing closely the world food economy, the future has never seemed less clear. #Link to the past openin how to#In the middle of a world food crisis, it is impossible to know how to intervene successfully to stop it without a clear understanding of these complexities and trade-offs.Įven with this background, it seems foolhardy to write about the prospects for world food security in these highly uncertain times. However, the definition misses the essential trade-offs in those efforts, trade-offs that reflect the overwhelming complexity of food systems globally and locally. This definition no doubt resonates with many readers of this blog, but it also resonates with someone who has tried over the past several decades to make various food systems perform better for the poor. #Link to the past openin free#“What we really mean is profit-minded corporate logic set free on a global scale at an incalculable cost to health, economic stability, cultural coherence and joy.” In his February 20, 2022, New York Times Book Review of Eating to Extinction: The World’s Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino, Pete Wells, the New York Times restaurant critic, provided a very unflattering definition of “the food system.” To do this work, it is necessary to understand the “food systems” in which each society operates. Both topics present controversial policy issues to the economics profession. During the historical process of structural transformation, agriculture as an economic sector plays a progressively smaller role in the macro economy, at the same time that it becomes more productive at the farm level. ![]() I have two main specialties: (1) avoiding food crises by stabilizing rice prices, both in individual countries and in global markets, and (2) managing the structural transformation, reflecting my early experience in Asia with the changing role of rice in domestic economies at different stages of development. ![]() Apart from the academic part of my career spent at Stanford, Cornell, three faculties at Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, I was deeply engaged with national policy makers in Indonesia, China, and Vietnam. Through good luck and perhaps a sensitivity to food issues, I ended up as a development economist specializing in agricultural, food and nutrition issues, mostly in Southeast and East Asia. I obtained a PhD from Harvard, specializing in economic history, but did my thesis on a more esoteric topic (estimating a probabilistic frontier production function for US agriculture). I grew up on a farm in Miami County, Ohio (just north of Dayton), worked in a small family-run tomato canning factory for over a decade, and then left to become an economist. Some personal background might be useful as I write this blog for the Food Tank website, apart from my membership. ![]()
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