Sarkozy and Tobin; the first charter city; measuring GDP from space; food prices and speculation; become a UN Godmother; Dani Rodrik’s new book; hand puppet climate change: links I liked

“Nicolas Sarkozy wants one. George Soros thinks it is a good idea. Development campaigners have it at the top of their wish list. The question, therefore, is whether the time for a Tobin tax has come?” Larry Elliott explores one impact of the French G20 presidency.

Is Honduras building the first charter city?

Measuring country GDP from space

Food price special:
“The current spike in food prices has followed the chain of events of the crisis of 2007-08 in almost every aspect, a worrisome prospect. First the crop failures; second the export restrictions; and third the initial food riots followed by governments taking emergency measures to control rising food costs, including price caps and cuts to import tariffs. And now the fourth element of the 2007-08 food crisis is emerging: panic buying.” The FT’s commodities guru, Javier Blas explains.

So is speculation a cause of food price spikes or not? Tim Wise thinks it is, and has good links to some of the main reports on it.  Aid Thoughts disagrees. I think we’re gonna have to have an online poll on this one.

Become a ‘Godmother’ to UN Women, and help ensure the infant agency grows up healthy and strong. Background piece from Madeleine Bunting.

Dani Rodrik has a new book out, the Globalization Paradox. See here for a trailer – seven principles for global economic governance.

And finally, the two minute hand puppet version of the Cancun climate talks. Thinks they just about get it right. [h/t Alex Evans]

 

Right, I am now off on holiday for two weeks, but have scheduled a few posts to keep on clogging up your mailboxes. Someone will check and OK any comments, but apologies for not responding to them – I’ll be doing something much more enjoyable……

Gender Equality and Development: What will (and won’t) be in the 2012 World Development Report?

Just got round to reading the 65 page outline (dread to think how long the final version will be) of the 2012 World Development Report on ‘Gender Equality and Development’. Kudos to the Bank, as ever, for putting such documents online as part of the report writing process – how many NGOs ever consider doing that? (see here for a rather successful example of us trying to do this).

As always with these World Bank flagships, it’s fascinating both for what’s in there and for what’s missing.

The report will emphasize four main messages:

1. During the last quarter century, sustained growth in many countries has been particularly effective in reducing disparities on some dimensions of gender equality (e.g. girls’ education and fertility decline – though that’s not entirely an issue of gender equality….). And, the pace of change in these outcomes has been much faster in today’s developing countries than it has historically been in high-income countries.

2. However, economic growth—even at a pace more rapid and sustained—will not by itself be enough to bring about improvements across all dimensions of gender equality. Growth alone won’t close the remaining gender gaps; poor women are missing out on the benefits of growth and constraints other than income (access to land, social norms, political voice) will continue to generate inequality even in high income societies

3. The costs to countries of maintaining gender inequality are likely to have become even larger in the globalized world of the 21st Century. At the same time, globalization offers opportunities for more rapid changes in norms and beliefs concerning gender equality. The Bank sees a ‘growign global consensus on the importance of gender equality’.

4. There is an important role for policies targeted towards reducing the most costly gender disparities that are not responsive to growth, and closing the most egregious gender gaps has become more urgent now than it was two or three decades ago.

Nothing too earth shattering in that, but it does matter (a lot) that the Bank is devoting such a high profile publication to the issue – previous WDRs such as the 2008 one on agriculture have played a big part in shifting the wider development debate (though others have sunk without trace), and it is to be hoped that this one has similar impact.

So what’s good, bad and/or missing?

Good: as always, the Bank has assembled a colossal literature review – dozens of great killer facts and examples that we will all be mining in the years ahead. However, the outline does little to address the weakness of some of the really big ‘stylised facts’, some of them highly questionable or just plain wrong like the ‘70% of the world’s poor are women’ stat. An alarming number of the big stats on land use, access to services etc that are routinely trotted out come from studies that are 20 years old or more. Let’s hope the final version updates these or gives us some new ones.

The report also avoids the trap of equating ‘gender’ with ‘women’, acknowledging that men lag women on an increasing number of issues like tertiary education, health (obesity, alcoholism) or life expectancy.

Bad/Missing: Although the draft’s conceptual framework breaks up the drivers of change into formal institutions such as governments, informal institutions (such as social norms and network) and markets, its implicit change model is based on the interaction between governments, policies, academic evidence and individual voters. The institutions bit is pretty impoverished, with precious little signs of any collective actors located between households and the state, such as churches, media, civil society or even the women’s movement. The draft has a telling sentence where it defines society as ‘the sum of individuals and households’. Oh dear.

Perhaps predictably, given who the report is trying to influence, gender equality (and development more broadly) is understood, discussed, calculated etc. largely in terms of economic growth and economic calculations (whether of household, their members and other institutions).

Because of this privileging of the economic, the critical role in society of reproduction -  still so undervalued – and the reality that women continue to play the primary reproductive role, gets lost or downplayed.  If we go down the road of the narrow contribution to ‘production’ in the ‘economy’, we are likely to further undervalue the major contribution of women in reproduction. We also further the pressure on women to have to contribute in the recognised ‘production’ part of the ‘economy’ (if they are to have recognition and respect) while they also have to continue playing the primary role in reproduction – more stress for women, less value of their role = problem. This argument of course should not undermine the absolute right of women to have the same opportunities for participation in production when they choose to.

The outline is far too dismissive of ‘wellbeing’ and other new economics – even a perfunctory trawl of the gender issues in major Bank exercises like Voices of the Poor would have identified issues of shame, humiliation and fear as just as important to women’s lived experience of poverty as income measures.

It appears blind to the gendered impact of technologies, whether old and new.

Some of these holes can still be filled with decent case studies, so if you are engaged on these issues, make sure to send them over to the WDR team.

[Thanks to Ines Smyth and other Oxfam gender gurus for their input to this post]

The new Future of Food and Farming Report: excellent diagnosis; patchy cure; no power and politics

I attended the launch at the UK Treasury this week of The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and Choices for Global Sustainability. It’s a high level UK government report from some top scientists, and should have significant influence over the next few years on much of the terrain Oxfam will be exploring in its new campaign on food and resource constraints. Here are some initial impressions, based on the 40 page (!) executive summary.

Overall Message: ‘The food system is failing humanity’, John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to UK Government at the launch.

The report argues that there are both major failings in the food system today, and five key future challenges, namely:

1. Balancing future supply and demand sustainably (i.e. feed the 9 billion without destroying the planet)

2. Managing volatility and protecting the vulnerable from unavoidable volatility

3. Ending hunger (the social justice/Amartya Sen bit)

4. Mitigating climate change in agriculture

5. Maintaining biodiversity and ‘ecosystem services’ (which seems to be what we now call the environment)

It sees small farmers as ‘an important component of both hunger and poverty reduction’ (p. 25)

In terms of policy asks, it lists the key priorities for action for policy makers as:
1. Spread best practice.
2. Invest in new knowledge.
3. Make sustainable food production central in development.
4. Work on the assumption that there is little new land for agriculture.
5. Ensure long-term sustainability of fish stocks.
6. Promote sustainable intensification.
7. Include the environment in food system economics.
8. Reduce waste – both in high- and low-income countries.
9. Improve the evidence base upon which decisions are made and develop metrics to assess progress.
10. Anticipate major issues with water availability for food production.
11. Work to change consumption patterns.
12. Empower citizens.

What do I disagree with? Not much. The report is maybe a bit too starry-eyed about science and technology, both old and new (hardly surprising given its authorship), but even there, with caveats:

‘New technologies (such as the genetic modification of living organisms and the use of cloned livestock and nanotechnology) should not be excluded a priori on ethical or moral grounds, though there is a need to respect the views of people who take a contrary view….. Decisions about the acceptability of new technologies need to be made in the context of competing risks (rather than by simplistic versions of the precautionary principle); the potential costs of not utilising new technology must be taken into account.’ (exec sum, p. 11)

Economically, the report is fairly liberal – arguing strongly for liberalized trade and against government intervention in a number of areas such as the regulation of corporate oligopolies (exec sum p 21). In contrast to its explicit criticism of export bans, it is more ambivalent (and vague) about land grabs.

The limits to liberalism are particularly evident in the lack of ideas on reducing volatility, where the report prefers transparency, information and safety nets to any kind of more forceful regulation (pp. 23/4). It says the jury is still out on whether speculation is a significant cause of volatility and is sceptical on global and virtual reserves apart from for WFP stocks for specific emergencies (p. 24).

It is pretty timid on the need to reduce meat consumption, merely mentioning it as a future possibility (p. 22)

But what worries me much more are the gaps. The report follows the unfortunate standard pattern of strong diagnosis, weak cure and absolute vacuum on issues of power and politics. There are several welcome but vague references to empowering women and northern consumers, but there it ends. There is almost no mention of producer organizations or more generally how to achieve a fairer distribution of power in markets, even though it is clear that the benefits of participation in such markets are shaped to a large extent by the relative power of the players involved.

When it comes to a model of change, there isn’t one. No discussion of what to do when those who profit from the status quo resist change. Instead the report takes refuge in the passive tense ‘a stronger constituency for hunger reduction needs to be built’. No power analysis, or sense of how the reforms it proposes might actually come about, and which are more/less politically feasible. No discussion of the likely role of climate and economic shocks like the food price spike in triggering change. Another depressing ‘if I ruled the world’ technocrats’ report, in fact.

It really is striking how many of these reports and processes refuse to stray from the happy sunlit uplands of evidence-based policy-making and win-win solutions. They see the global food system is dysfunctional, but talk as if this is just through some kind of accidental oversight or lack of research, rather than as an outcome of historical processes, including distributive conflicts and political struggle. Instead, the authors assume they can talk of a collective ‘we’, with shared interests and common solutions. The contrast between the subtlety of the science and the crudity/absence of politics (beyond largely vacuous appeals to ‘political will’ and ‘good governance’) is striking. It echoes the kind of ‘magical thinking’ on climate change that ran aground in Cancun, and which is regularly and brilliantly critiqued on the Political Climate blog.

When confronted with trade-offs – win-lose issues – such reports generally deny or avoid them, and have little idea how to discuss, let alone influence, non evidence-based approaches, even though those are an essential (some would argue much more important) part of political reality. The gulf between the polite debate in Whitehall and the turmoil on the streets of Cairo and Tunis (driven in part by high food prices) could not be greater.

In a sense, I guess that’s OK. Reports like these try to influence governments and other decision makers by expanding the boundary of rational policy making against the forces of ‘irrational’ (or at least non evidence-based) conflicts and political power. Talking of conflicts and power could mean taking sides and would risk compromising their objectivity in the eyes of their target audience. Instead, they aim to strengthen the hand of the Platonic guardians, be they civil servants or scientists, in shaping public policy and that is (generally) a good thing.

But even if the rationalist bubble is expanding over time, this approach still leaves a huge chunk of real life outside the remit of such reports, and that seems a serious weakness. Wouldn’t it be great if some body had the courage and the funding to take 10 of the major international reports (Stern on Climate Change, others on development, MDGs etc etc) and produced a parallel series of ‘the politics of X’ reports for each (and Anthony Giddens’ effort on climate change doesn’t count)? Any takers?

How to get a PhD in a year (without giving up the day job)

I recently got a ‘PhD by published work’ from Oxfam’s local university, Oxford Brookes. Here’s how it works: if you have amassed a ‘significant body of work’ in the shape of books, chapters, papers etc (sorry emails and tweets don’t count), you submit these as the body of your PhD and then (the interesting bit) write a supervised 15,000 word ‘critical review’ of your own work, comparing it to the academic literature on the relevant issues. If your writing wanders all over the place, as mine has, then you identify a theme within it – in my case the interaction between citizens and states.

It's an ivory tower, stupid

It took a year – evenings, weekends, holidays and a bit of Oxfam time and combined elements of narcissism (going back, reading and summarizing your own work over the last 20 years) and masochism (critiquing it both by comparing it to the real experts, and finally acknowledging all your own doubts about your arguments, previously suppressed). Narco-masochism?

Here’s the abstract:

“This critical review explores a central thread in the ideas and publications generated by 25 years of writing and activism – the nature of and interaction between citizens and states in development.

It explores the evolution of these arguments in the works in question, and reviews the literature in separate sections on the validity of the state-citizen framework, the nature of citizenship, the role of the state in development, and state-citizen interaction.

The discussion identifies strengths in the works under review. Despite their overlaps and blurred boundaries, the basic framework of ‘active citizens and effective states’ has withstood scrutiny and the framework’s endogeneity has helped in understanding the internal dynamics and evolution of political, social and economic development.

The review highlights some apparent gaps and weaknesses in the literature, notably the reliance of much of the work on the history of citizenship on the particular experiences of Western Europe and North America; the flimsiness of the discussion of the ‘democratic developmental state’ and the lack of analysis of ‘peacetime’ active citizenship in non-democratic contexts, for example rural protest movements in China and Vietnam, or women’s rights movements in Islamic societies.

The review also identifies a number of weaknesses in the works under review that need to be addressed in my future research. These include the importance of economic power and structures, the internal structure and dynamics of citizens’ movements, the negative roles of some citizens’ movements in excluding or attacking other groups of poor people, and the interaction between national and global citizens’ movements.”

If you really want to read the full 40 page review, you can download it here (I recommend the bibliography, if nothing else).

I found the exercise incredibly useful – it’s hard for us old farts to find time to reflect and look back, but the exercise has given me a lot of ideas for future directions for research, especially on change models, which I intend to take forward both in Oxfam and with the Institute of Development Studies (where I became a visiting fellow this year).

At present PhDs by published work are usually confined to alumni and/or serving academics at the university in question. Brookes should be commended for opening that out to the rest of us late career development professionals (or whatever we call ourselves) – let’s hope more universities follow suit.

And of course, apologies to those friends and readers who are currently ploughing through real, 4 year+, existential-crisis type PhDs – my only defence is that I had previously suffered my fill of those in writing the books I submitted…….

By the way, I asked around PhD-carrying friends as to the benefits (other than personal enlightenment). So far I have had ‘being able to buy prescription drugs over the counter in Africa’ and ‘getting upgrades on flights, and hoping no-one gets sick’. Any other candidates?

The Obama Doctrine – where is the US going on development and diplomacy?

Government reports don’t come with much less enticing titles than the US ‘Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review’ but as is often the way, a boring title signals important content, setting out big and in some cases excellent plans for US foreign and development policy. The director of the review, Anne Marie Slaughter, presented the review at Chatham House in London last week – here are some highlights.

Some key messages are in the title of the review, ‘Leading Through Civilian Power’. which marks a rupture with the militarism and force projection of previous administrations. There’s a big focus on Human Security (described by Slaughter as an ‘important shift’), expanding the notion of security beyond terrorism to highlight issues of human rights and democracy – security within states.

A greater focus on regional and multilateral bodies shows that the US accepts that its unilateralist traditions are becoming increasingly counterproductive and ineffective in a multipolar world.

Slaughter described development as one of Hilary Clinton’s ‘principal charges to us, making it an equal pillar with diplomacy’. This included ‘rebuilding USAID’, moving from what she characterized as a ‘contracting agency’ to something more like the European model. Even allowing for her desire to flatter hosts, it was noteworthy that she said ‘we have looked extensively at DFID, which really is a thought leader’ – although that examination did not stretch to making USAID an independent government department like DFID. Along similar lines, here’s last week’s speech by the new USAID administrator Rajiv Shah, arguing that AID should get out of contracting and channel cash through governments, civil society organizations and private sectors. More on developments in USAID here.

Perhaps most striking of all was Slaughter’s (and Clinton’s) outspoken and sustained emphasis on women’s rights. I asked her about this, and whether it posed a risk to US foreign policy either in terms of domestic support (remember the backlash back in 1992 when Clinton as would-be first lady foreswore the baking of cookies) or in terms of relationships with less enlightened governments. Here’s her reply:

‘Things have changed domestically – we are on our third woman secretary of state now. But it has also changed because the evidence [that women rights are essential to development] is so overwhelming.’ With respect to relationships overseas, ‘there is a trade off that the Secretary of State is willing to make. You find ways to work with women’s groups even where governments are not supportive. It’s not easy, but it’s a place we have to go.’

All this echoed an excellent Guardian piece by Madeleine Bunting on Clinton’s ‘feminist foreign policy’.

The politics behind the QDDR is partly that when she sat as a senator on the Armed Services Committee, Hilary Clinton saw the impact of the Quadrennial Defense Review in proving value for money and supporting budget requests. Clinton wants Congress to require the State Department to repeat the QDDR exercise every four years – a way to keep the US Government from sliding back into old ways.

Final quote: “If there is an Obama doctrine, it is that ‘with power comes responsibility’”. Yup, Spiderman (or at least his Uncle Ben) has taken over the White House.

The ambition, the erudition and the appetite for change conjured up a whiff of the euphoria of November 2008, a pleasant change from much of the more negative mood music from the US in more recent times.

More on the QDDR here, from Global Dashboard’s David Steven.

See below for a full 40 minute presentation by Dr Slaughter in a suitably West Wing setting

Cargill cashes in; wikileaks on China and Africa; 1/3 of Zimbabwe’s voters are dead; Dambisa Moyo’s new book; South African Aid; business and human rights: links I liked

Food price crisis, what crisis? ‘Cargill, the world’s largest agricultural commodities trader, announced on Wednesday that its profits had tripled year-on-year in the second quarter of its fiscal year, as the company profited from supply disruptions in the global food chain and rising prices’.

What does Wikileaks tell us about the US government’s real view of China in Africa?

A third of Zimbabwe’s registered voters are dead. Others appear to be up to 120 years old.

“Here are two predictions about the world economy. First, the West’s malaise and the rise of emerging economies will yield a mountain of books. Second, few of these are likely to be as bad as “How the West Was Lost””. No such thing as a bad review? Think again, judging by the Economist’s battering of Dambisa Moyo’s new book, her first since ‘Dead Aid’.

South Africa launches its own aid agency [h/t Hugh Cole].

Where are we on businesses and human rights? Good overview from Lyuba Zarsky

Tunisian rap uprising; so you want to be an aid worker? Donate your fat: videos for the weekend

One video which inspires, and two which don’t

‘Although western audiences are still waiting for a reflowering of political music to capture the spirit of the times, in Africa it never went away’. Africa’s protest music is booming –  Tunisian rapper The General is just the tip of an inspiring iceberg.

 
‘So you want to be an aid worker?’ Latest in the rash of slightly disturbing animated cartoons, like extended disjointed railway announcements + bad graphics, but funny in parts.

Donate your fat…. . Sorry Practical Action, you’re a great organization, but I fear this attempt at a spoof is disturbing, v bad taste and probably downright counterproductive, on a par with last year’s infamous ‘no pressure’ climate change video about exploding people

Want to avoid financial crises? Then reduce inequality, says the IMF

What are they putting in the water at the IMF these days? Following its recent advocacy of not one, but two new global taxes, a new IMF working paper by Michael Kumhof and Romain Ranciere links inequality with financial crises.

“The United States experienced two major economic crises over the past century—the Great Depression starting in 1929 and the Great Recession starting in 2007. Both were preceded by a sharp increase in income and wealth inequality, and by a similarly sharp increase in debt-to-income ratios among lower- and middle-income households. When those debt-to-income ratios started to be perceived as unsustainable, it became a trigger for the crisis. In this paper, we first document these facts, and then present a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which a crisis driven by income inequality can arise endogenously. The crisis is the ultimate result, after a period of decades, of a shock to the relative bargaining powers over income of two groups of households, investors who account for 5% of the population, and whose bargaining power increases, and workers who account for 95% of the population.

The model is kept as simple as possible in order to allow for a clear understanding of the mechanisms at work. The key mechanism is that investors use part of their increased income to purchase additional financial assets backed by loans to workers. By doing so, they allow workers to limit their drop in consumption following their loss of income, but the large and highly persistent rise of workers’ debt-to-income ratios generates financial fragility which eventually can lead to a financial crisis. Prior to the crisis, increased saving at the top and increased borrowing at the bottom results in consumption inequality increasing significantly less than income inequality. Saving and borrowing patterns of both groups create an increased need for financial services and intermediation. As a consequence the size of the financial sector, as measured by the ratio of banks’ liabilities to GDP, increases. The crisis is characterized by large-scale household debt defaults and an abrupt output contraction as in the 2007 U.S. financial crisis. Because crises are costly, redistribution policies that prevent excessive household indebtedness and reduce crisis-risk ex-ante can be more desirable from a macroeconomic stabilization point of view than ex-post policies such as bailouts or debt restructurings. To our knowledge, our framework is the first to provide an internally consistent mechanism linking the empirically observed rise in income inequality between high income households and poor to middle income households, the increase in household debt-to-income ratios among the latter group, and the risk of a financial crisis.”

Conclusion (after lots of suitably impressive equations)? “restoration of poor and middle income households’ bargaining power can be very effective, leading to the prospect of a sustained reduction in leverage that should reduce the probability of a further crisis.”

Dynamite. [h/t Matthew Lockwood]

What does the future hold for civil society organization?

I’ve been struggling to make sense of the changing landscape for civil society organizations, North and South, and could do with your help. Here are some initial thoughts, but please send in your own, plus useful references:

One door opens, another shuts
There are contradictory and ambiguous trends for civil society at national and global levels. On the plus side:
· Growing size, strength and sophistication at national level and globally of CSOs of all shapes, sizes and coalitions. (For an example, see previous post on the Global Campaign for Education)
· Recognition from other actors (international institutions, aid donors, TNCs) of the importance of CSOs as partners and stakeholders

But on the negative side, according to a new report by Civicus, the crackdown in countries such as Ethiopia, Zambia and India has accelerated in 2009-10, affecting some 90 countries,:

“What began as a knee jerk reaction to a horrific event in 2001 (9/11), assumed a life of its own by the end of the decade. The world is presently witnessing a cascade of laws and regulatory measures to restrict the rights of citizens to freely express their views, associate and assemble. Peaceful demonstrators, activists, journalists, human rights defenders and ordinary citizens are increasingly facing motivated prosecution, harassment, physical abuse and threats to their lives for challenging well-entrenched power structures. The proffered justifications range from counter-terrorism to national security, cultural relativism to national sovereignty and government ownership of development processes as opposed to democratic ownership.”

The rise of the BRICS has had similarly ambiguous impacts, giving greater global prominence to civil society-led change in countries such as India and Brazil, and challenging the Washington Consensus previously opposed by so many CSOs, but also providing alternative, no-strings-attached sources of investment and diplomatic support that have made it easier for anti-democratic governments to ignore Western pressures to democratize.

In the North, the shift to the right in Europe and the US has had ambiguous results. Cutbacks have encouraged governments such as the UK to highlight the role of the ‘Big Society’, including (at least rhetorically) a central role for CSOs. But this role is frequently restricted to service delivery, rather than advocacy – there may be a larger share of a dwindling aid budget available to CSOs, but it is likely to have a political price tag. Aid volumes are likely to stagnate or even fall, if history is any guide, leaving development NGOs with a choice between a defensive ‘stick to your promises’ campaign, a push for innovative forms of financing (eg Robin Hood Tax, tax havens), a rebalancing towards quality of aid rather than quantity, or a shift in focus towards domestic resource mobilization (commodity royalties, domestic tax reform).

So how does the zeitgeist feel to you?

The Upside of High Food Prices

Nice pieces from agricultural economist Steve Wiggins on the ODI and Guardian blogs, which I quote at length, because I think it’s an important correction to the discussion on the current food price spike.

‘In 2008 developing countries, and poor people within them, were hit hard by the price spike in the international cereals market. Once again food prices are moving up, not that far short of the levels seen three years ago, so does this mean another bout of hardship? Not quite: there’s a difference this time.

Why? It is not just cereals prices, nor just food prices, that are rising, but almost all agricultural prices – including those of the main tropical exports: cocoa, coffee and tea; cotton; palm oil; sugar; and rubber. Most low income countries, leaving aside the few with minerals and oil, depend heavily on these for their export earnings. Often, much of the production comes from small farmers. Higher prices mean windfall gains for them, gains that are likely to be spent on local goods and services, with strong multipliers in additional jobs and incomes for others on low incomes.

On the other hand, most of these countries are net importers of cereals and will suffer from higher prices on these items.

So where will the balance between extra costs and windfall gains fall? Let’s consider five countries: Burkina Faso; Ghana; Indonesia; Kenya; and Nicaragua; then see the likely impact through changes in the value of their trade in 10 of the most commonly traded items – maize, rice, wheat; palm oil; tea, coffee, cocoa; sugar; cotton, and rubber.

Look at the data and it is clear that all five countries get a large boost to their export revenues – by around 20% in two cases, by 40% in another two, and by more than 100% in Burkina Faso – the latter thanks to it being so heavily dependent on cotton, the price of which has risen dramatically over the past six months.

None of this will provide much solace to those who are feeling the brunt of price increases. We should focus efforts to ease the consequences of another price spike on those we know are most prone to shocks. By identifying those countries with the highest existing levels of hunger who are also major consumers of cereals and dependent on cereal imports we can pinpoint the areas where need is likely to be greatest. Overseas Development Institute studies show these countries are clustered in West Africa, the Horn of Africa and South Central Asia.

When may prices come down from current levels? Provided that the harvests of 2011 are not hit by bad weather, then prices of cereals should come down substantially by the late summer: from experience in 2008, farmers can be expected to produce large harvests in response to higher prices.”

Net impact of commodity windfall minus higher food import prices is shown here.

Conclusion? An obvious point, but one that often gets lost – we need to consider the net impact of price changes on both producers and consumers and on the economy as a whole (eg are commodity exports properly taxed and the proceeds spent progressively? To what extent do high prices reach small farmers and landless labourers?). Reality is, as researchers and wonks love to stress, complicated.