Independent research & practical ideas for global prosperity

Peter Timmer

Profile: Peter Timmer is a leading authority on agriculture and rural development who has published scores of papers on these topics. He has served as a professor at Harvard, Cornell, and Stanford, where he currently teaches a course on Pathways Out of Rural Poverty. A core advisor on the World Bank’s recently published World Development Report 2008: Agriculture for Development, Timmer is advising the Indonesian government on domestic policy responses to the crisis in the global rice market.
Full Bio: http://www.cgdev.org/content/expert/detail/2720/

Posts:

December 7, 2009

Philippines’ Aggressive Rice Purchases Could Spark Another Crisis

By Peter Timmer

I wrote in a CGD Note last week with Tom Slayton about how the Philippines are engaging in aggressive buying techniques that seem designed to drive up prices, raising the specter of another rice price crisis such as what befell us in early 2008. When more than 3 billion people—more than half of whom are very poor—depend on rice for their daily diet, a repeat of 2008 would put many in danger. Read More…

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September 22, 2008

Poor People Will Get Hurt And Confidence in the Market Will Fall (Development Impacts of Financial Crisis)

By Peter Timmer

Peter Timmer I have been following the lively exchanges begun by Liliana Rojas-Suarez’s post on the development impacts of the U.S. financial crisis, especially Michael Clemens’s provocative post and Nora Lustig’s thoughtful reply. I agree with Nora that there can be short-run but irreversible welfare consequences from these big financial meltdowns.

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May 19, 2008

Kudos to Tokyo and Washington on Rice Sales — Et Tu, Thailand and India?

By Peter Timmer

This post is joint with Tom Slayton, a rice trade expert and former editor of The Rice Trader
Today in Tokyo, Japan’s Vice Minister for Agriculture, Toshirou Shirasu, told reporters that Japan plans to export 200,000 tons of rice to the Philippines “as fast as possible.” This confirmed sale comes on top of 50,000 tons of Japanese rice previously under discussion. Even the anticipation of these sales had done much to take the speculative steam out of over-heated global rice markets, as we reported towards the end of last week (see “Rice Prices Fall After Congressional Hearings But Crisis Not Over Yet“), so with some sales now officially confirmed we can hope to see further easing of speculative pressures.

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May 15, 2008

Rice Prices Fall After Congressional Hearings But Crisis Not Over Yet

By Peter Timmer

This post is joint with Tom Slayton, a rice trade expert and former editor of The Rice Trader
It has been a busy week in the rice markets following CGD’s release on Monday of our note about how to puncture a speculative price bubble that threatens millions of people with malnutrition and worse (see Unwanted Rice in Japan Can Solve the Rice Crisis–If Washington and Tokyo Act ). On Wednesday our proposal was discussed at hearings on the world food crisis in both the House and Senate.

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May 1, 2008

President Bush Can and Should Do More to Address the Food Crisis: Let Japan Sell Its Rice Reserves

By Peter Timmer

This posting is joint with Vijaya Ramachandran

Today, President Bush called on Congress to provide another $770 million in food aid, in addition to the $200 million already allocated through the Department of Agriculture,in order "to keep our existing food aid programs robust."

There is no doubt that these additional funds are much needed to purchase and distribute food to those who are suffering greatly from the current spike in food prices. But the U.S. can and should do more. Specifically, the U.S. must allow Japan to sell, at full cost on Japanese books, the 1.5
million metric tons of rice that it has in storage. About 600,000 tons is
Thai and Vietnamese long-grain rice (high quality) and the rest is US medium
grain (good rice). All of the rice is in Japanese warehouses because of an
agreement with the World Trade Organization, and the U.S. as "cognizant
observer" of the rice agreement, would need to approve the sale of both
the
US and the Thai/Vietnamese rice. Japan currently cannot release this rice
to the World Food Program (or to the world market) without permission from
the U.S., and the Bush administration is yet to move on this.

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September 13, 2006

Gates and Rockefeller Invest in a Green Revolution for Africa: The Tough Road Ahead

By Peter Timmer

After years of neglect, agriculture is back on the agenda. In June the World Bank announced that it would prepare a World Development Report on Agriculture for Development for publication late next year. Then yesterday the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation announced that they will jointly invest in a Green Revolution for Africa. The goal, they said, is to “dramatically increase the productivity of small farms, moving tens of millions of people out of extreme poverty and significantly reducing hunger.”
For such a tall order, the initial funding announced is modest–$150 million over five years. If the amount signals caution, that’s appropriate. Bringing a Green Revolution to Africa is going to be extremely difficult, for three basic reasons.

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July 24, 2006

China Now World’s Third Largest Food Donor

By Peter Timmer

Food Aid China The World Food Program (WFP) has just released its annual Food Aid Monitor with data for 2005 on where food aid comes from and where it goes. At the top, there are no surprises: The U.S. is by far the largest donor, providing 4.0 million of the 8.2 million tons of total food aid. Sub-Saharan Africa is the largest recipient, taking all of that and more, for total food aid delivered of 4.6 million tons. Some people might be surprised that fast-growing Asia also received 2.4 million tons of food aid, but in fact there are more hungry people in Asia than in Africa. Rapid growth offers promise for Asia, but South Asia in particular starts from a very low base with massive poverty.
The big surprise, appropriately flagged in the WFP press release, is that China has emerged as the third largest food aid donor, providing 0.6 million tons. We cannot tell from the WFP report where this food aid went, but I’ll bet that China’s food aid is being used in the same strategic way that China uses the rest of its foreign assistance–to win friends and access to natural resources. For a fine summary from an African perspective, see Beijing Woos Africa’s Contemptibles, by Alec Wescott, an intern at the South African Institute of International Affairs, published last week in South Africa’s BusinessDay.

4 Comments »

June 20, 2006

World Development Report to Focus on Agriculture – It’s About Time!

By Peter Timmer

Every year the World Bank produces the World Development Report, its flagship research publication and showcase for the latest Bank thinking on development. Each report has a theme–the WDR 2006 is on “Equity and Development,” the one to be launched at the fall meetings in Singapore, WDR 2007, will be on “Youth.” The development profession eagerly awaits two different parts of the WDR process–the announcement of next year’s theme (and team leaders to produce it), and the subsequent launch of the final product, usually about 15 months later.
It’s that time of year. And much to the surprise of many, the WDR 2008 will be on “Agriculture and Development.” This is the first WDR to focus on agriculture since 1982 (!) . President Paul Wolfowitz selected agriculture as the topic for the first WDR to be completely produced under his leadership. That is an important statement of what the Bank considers to be the research and policy agenda going forward. At last Washington seems to have realized that any serious effort to reach the Millennium Development Goals on poverty and hunger must figure out how to stimulate the rural economies where three-quarters of the world’s poor people live. Most rural economies depend heavily on a dynamic agricultural sector if they are going to drive poverty reduction.
World Bank Chief Economist Francois Bourguignon has chosen Derek Byerlee and Alain de Janvry as co-directors of WDR 2008. Derek is a long-time Bank specialist in agricultural development and risk management; Alain is on leave from UC-Berkeley, where he has long been a professor of agricultural economics, specializing in modeling the interaction between agriculture and poverty, especially in Latin America. They are assembling an eclectic team of advisors (“Friends of WDR08”) and authors for the various chapters whose topics are now a work in progress. As a member of both parts of the team, I am looking forward to a very stimulating (and pressured) six months as we struggle to produce a first draft for external comment before the end of the year.
I promise to report progress as we make it…

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May 5, 2006

NATO report on China highlights rural challenge

By Peter Timmer

The NATO Parliamentary Assembly has just released a report on “China’s Development Challenge.” While the report discusses such topics as foreign investment and China’s energy needs, much of the analysis focuses on the challenge of rural development. This focus on the rapidly growing divide between China’s rural and urban economies and the fear of spreading rural unrest is correct: the problem has been growing for more than a decade. The report describes rural development as China’s “most daunting development task” and points out that failure carries risks for the rest of us:

If those living in this vast hinterland come to believe that China’s reform agenda and its participation in the global economic order have only introduced suffering and impoverishment, then instability could cause an ever less open China to recoil from what it might come to see as a hostile world.

Fixing this won’t be easy. Rural unrest in China is symptomatic of a flaw in the country’s development strategy: failure to meet the basic conditions for sustained growth first set out in 1776 by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Among these basics are clear property rights. Indeed it is the lack of secure property rights that is fueling much of the unrest in rural China, as peasants protest against industrial land grabs or pollution of fields that they work but do not own.

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May 1, 2006

John Kenneth Galbraith, 1908-2006

By Peter Timmer

I knew John Kenneth Galbraith only a little, as he was not actively teaching graduate students at Harvard by the time I was a student there in the late 1960s (which alone says something about his longevity). But I was the last faculty at Harvard teaching in the area of agricultural economics and thus followed directly in his footsteps. Galbraith was hired by the Harvard’s economics department to take over the agriculture courses originally developed and taught by Professor John D. Black. Obviously, Galbraith moved on to bigger and better things, from The Affluent Society (1958) to The New Industrial State (1967).
But much of Galbraith’s concern about poverty and income inequality grew out of his own rural background (which he was very happy to escape), and later his time spent as ambassador to India during the Kennedy Administration. Perhaps what continues to resonate from his writings for the field of development in an era of globalization are the dual messages from his two most famous books noted above. First, private consumption does not solve the problem of public well-being, as Galbraith was fully aware of the glaring inadequacy in the provision of global public goods over the past several decades. Second, his concern for undue influence by corporate actors clearly remains relevant as Ken Lay testifies about malfeasance during the Enron meltdown. I suspect Galbraith went to his grave satisfied that his early insights had been fully vindicated.

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April 17, 2006

Is new Asia becoming old Europe on the labor front?

By Peter Timmer

There is an old French maxim that says, if you can’t fire a worker, don’t hire him. Asia seems to be learning French. The widespread “push-back” against earlier abuses of labor rights by non-democratic regimes is producing a host of well-intentioned labor market interventions throughout Asia that risk undermining the region’s greatest asset: it’s abundant and affordable labor. In Indonesia, for example, minimum wages have risen three-fold since 1998 and a number of local governments are actively competing to see who can have the highest minimum wage. Severance pay in Indonesia is now higher than in France–and, once hired it’s almost impossible to fire a worker.
From 1994 to 2004, the unemployment rate increased 20 percent in South Asia, 44 percent in East Asia, and over 55 percent in Southeast Asia, even as the regional economies grew considerably, according to UNESCAP’s 2006 survey. The number of unemployed people went from four to nine million in East Asia and from 5.5 to 14.6 million in Southeast Asia and Pacific states from 1992 to 2002.

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December 13, 2005

Food Aid in Perspective

By Peter Timmer

Reuters is reporting from Hong Kong that a food aid fight between the U.S. and the Europeans has darkened the mood as trade talks get underway in Hong Kong.

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December 7, 2005

Are Low Prices Really Bad for the Poor?

By Peter Timmer

Martina Gernet has posted on Eldis a summary of several recent studies of the role of supermarkets in developing countries. All of them appear to be about the bad effects of supermarkets on workers and suppliers. I continue to be astonished by how the debate over the impact of supermarkets always ignores the huge gains in welfare of consumers, especially poor consumers. As Sebastian Mallaby pointed out in a recent column in the The Washington Post titled “Progressive Wal-Mart. Really.”
the gains to poor people from lower prices dwarf any losses to workers or suppliers. Sebastian is mostly writing about the U.S. but the same arguments apply in developing countries. Indeed, whether or not workers and suppliers actually incur losses is controversial, since both operate in highly competitive markets. That is, they have alternatives if they don’t like working for or supplying supermarkets.

2 Comments »

December 2, 2005

Andrew Natsios Retiring from USAID

By Peter Timmer

The announcement today that Andrew Natsios will retire as Administrator of USAID should concern the development community.

1 Comment »

November 2, 2005

The Politics of Food Aid

By Peter Timmer

Andrew Natsios, the Administrator of USAID, put the politics of US food aid back on the agenda when he proposed converting a quarter of the food aid budget to cash instead of directly procuring commodities in the US. For 50 years, the farm bloc, large multinational food processors, the US shipping industry, and charitable organizations engaged in relief and development activities in poor countries have supported generous funding for America’s food aid program. All of the food provided through this program was grown in the US, processed by US firms, shipped on US bottoms, and distributed through US-based agencies and organizations. Hungry people got fed, farmers got paid, and all the intermediaries did well by doing good. Sounds like a good political deal.

6 Comments »

August 10, 2004

Reflections on Launching Three Books about Poverty, Inequality, and Economic Growth

By Peter Timmer

By C. Peter Timmer and Ashley S. Timmer

Access the full commentary (PDF)

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