Posts Tagged:

 

July 17, 2008

President Bush Should Order the EPA to Waive the Ethanol Mandate Next Week

Posted by Kimberly Ann Elliott in Agriculture, CGD Initiatives, Climate Change, Environment, Food & Agriculture, Global Warming, Migration and Labor Mobility, Rural Development Tags:

Governor Rick Perry of Texas, representing a major livestock-producing state hammered by rising feed costs, has petitioned the Environmental Policy Agency to suspend half of the mandated level for blending ethanol in gasoline. The EPA has the authority under the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 to suspend all or part of the mandate for up to a year if there is a “significant renewable feedstock disruption or other market circumstance” and the administrator is supposed to respond to Governor Perry’s petition by July 24. Surely the current food price crisis, exacerbated by this spring’s flooding along the Mississippi, qualifies as a significant disruption.

Read More…

Comment »

 

July 8, 2008

Albright and Podesta Call for Rich Country Action on Food Crisis, Including Release of Japanese Rice Stockpile

Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Food Crisis, G8, Migration and Labor Mobility, News, Rural Development, Trade Tags: , , ,

Former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Clinton and CEO of the Center for American Progress, have urged rich world leaders assembled for the G8 summit in Japan to take action on the global food crisis, including rapid release of Japanese rice stockpiles imported mostly from the US. In an Op-Ed in today’s Boston Globe they write:

The food crisis must be a top priority at this week’s G8 summit. Agriculture continues to experience more trade distortions than any sector in the global economy. For its part, the developed world — particularly the United States, the European Union and Japan — must confront the global impact of our subsidies and tariffs on agricultural products. Barriers to trade between developing countries must also be reduced. The United States should redouble its diplomatic efforts with key food producing countries to discourage government and private sector export restrictions that encourage hoarding.
The evidence is clear that our global agricultural system is broken and that in our interdependent world, food security is a challenge we must tackle together. The actual release of Japan’s imported rice will be a welcome step toward ending the immediate crisis. But over the long term, getting the system right will require heavy political lifting, painstaking negotiations, and the modernization of agricultural policies that have not kept pace with globalization.

Read More…

Comment »

 

July 2, 2008

President Sarkozy’s Compassion for the Poor and Hungry

Posted by Kimberly Ann Elliott in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Food Crisis, Globalization, Migration and Labor Mobility, News, Rural Development, Trade, World Trade Organization Tags: , ,

A report in the Financial Times by John Thornhill leads with a remarkable quote from French President Nicolas Sarkozy warning the EU that he would block a proposed World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on agriculture that would reduce European production incentives:

Read More…

Comment »

 

May 28, 2008

Rice Prices Tumble But Remain Out of Reach for Many of the Poor

Posted by Tom Slayton in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Food Aid, News, Rural Development, Trade Tags: ,

This is a joint posting with Peter Timmer
Rice prices have continued to tumble this week amid reports that Cambodia is moving to ease export restrictions and other exporters may follow suit. This came after Japan’s announcement that it would proceed with sales to the Philippines of 250,000 tons of rice (200,000 tons of imports and 50,000 tons of Japanese rice), and a U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) statement that: “the United States was supportive of Japan’s initiative.” (Readers who are following this story will recall that the U.S. has the ability to block the re-export of U.S. rice that Japan was compelled to buy but never offered on the domestic market).

Read More…

2 Comments »

 

May 15, 2008

Rice Prices Fall After Congressional Hearings But Crisis Not Over Yet

Posted by Peter Timmer in Agriculture, Aid Effectiveness, Food & Agriculture, Food Aid, Food Crisis, Global Health, Migration and Labor Mobility, Rural Development Tags: , ,

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.

Read More…

Comment »

 

May 7, 2008

The US Farm Bill: From Bad to Worse?

Posted by Kimberly Ann Elliott in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Rural Development Tags: ,

“House and Senate negotiators bargaining over a new farm bill have reduced funding for a key school lunch program for poor children abroad and agreed to sharply expand nutrition programs for low-income families and children in the United States.”
Washington Post, May 6, 2008
“How can the world’s hungriest schoolchildren be denied meals while the farm bill being debated in a House-Senate conference provides millions in subsidies for wealthy farmers? That’s what Congress proposes. In all fairness, it should not become law.”
Former Senators Robert Dole and George McGovern, Washington Post, May 6, 2008

Read More…

3 Comments »

 

May 6, 2008

Ethanol Opposition Makes for Strange Bedfellows

Posted by Lawrence MacDonald in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Food Crisis, Migration and Labor Mobility, News, Rural Development Tags: ,

Sam Loewenberg at Politico has an interesting story that describes the odd coalition that has emerged in opposition to ethanol subsidies — development and humanitarian NGOs, the livestock and food processing industries, and big oil. As Sam reports:

The headline-grabbing global food crisis has given the anti-ethanol crowd a rare opportunity to take up a legislative battle they thought they had lost. Industry has found an unlikely ally among several humanitarian groups, leaders of which hope that cutting back on ethanol will lower food prices.

Read More…

2 Comments »

 

July 30, 2007

House Passes Farm Bill, Thumbs Its Nose at Poorest Trading Partners and WTO

Posted by Kimberly Ann Elliott in Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, Rural Development, World Trade Organization Tags: ,

For poor developing country farmers and their advocates, the farm bill that passed the House of Representatives on Friday could hardly be worse news. Dissatisfaction with existing farm legislation is widespread and, with commodity prices high, it seemed as though a real opportunity existed to both reform America’s costly and inequitable farm policy and give the stalled Doha Round of trade negotiations a boost. But those hopes have been at least temporarily dashed. (See Washington Post article and House Committee on Agriculture website for more on House passage of the farm bill.)

Read More…

1 Comment »

 

October 13, 2006

Yunus and Grameen win Nobel: The “Great Man” Theory of Development History?

Posted by David Roodman in Global Development, Microfinance, Rural Development Tags: ,

The development world was electrified today by the news that Muhammad Yunus and the institution he founded, the Grameen Bank, will share the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.” As an economics professor at Chittagong University in Bangladesh in 1976, Yunus led his students in an innovative experiment: making tiny, short-term loans to people in the nearby village of Jobra. Most of the borrowers already had access to credit–from moneylenders or suppliers of such materials as bamboo–but at exorbitant rates. In the early days, Grameen lent mostly to men, but in the late 1980s, the balance shifted strongly in favor of women. Special legislation turned Grameen into a formal bank in 1983. According to the announcement:

Every single individual on earth has both the potential and the right to live a decent life. Across cultures and civilizations, Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that even the poorest of the poor can work to bring about their own development.

As in 2004, when it gave the Prize to Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, the Nobel Foundation has gone beyond a narrow definition of “peace” to embrace economic and social development, and to favor a charismatic individual who built a remarkable, multi-faceted private organization from scratch.

Read More…

5 Comments »

 

September 13, 2006

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

Posted by Peter Timmer in Africa, Agriculture, Food & Agriculture, News, Regions, Rural Development Tags:

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.

Read More…

Comment »

 

June 20, 2006

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

Posted by Peter Timmer in Global Development, Rural Development, World Bank Tags: ,

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…

2 Comments »