Wise interviewed by The Real News Network on High Farm Prices: Do family farmers benefit?

Timothy A Wise recently sat down for an interview with The Real News Network to talk about his  recent work on the “Farm Boom,” including a policy brief, Still Waiting for the Farm Boom: Family Farmers Worse off Despite High Crop Prices, and from a previous post on the Triple Crisis Blog, High Food Prices: Do Family Farmers Benefit?  

According to USDA officials, boom times continue for US farmers. The USDA’s chief economist claimed that in the last decade, farmers have “seen the highest net cash farm income numbers since the nineteen-seventies.”   Yet a recent GDAE Policy Brief by Timothy A Wise examines this “farm boom” and asks the question: who is really benefitting? Among Wise’s findings is the fact that small-to-mid scale family farmers are not benefitting from the boom, and they have actually seen a decline in net farm income with high prices.  Watch the interview:

Watch more interviews with The Real News Network on GDAE’s Globalization Multimedia page.

Food insecurity means few would mourn the death of Doha

Triple Crisis blogger Jayati Ghosh published the following opinion article in the Guardian on one reason why developing countries are skeptical about saving the Doha trade talks– the WTO agreement on agriculture left developing countries exposed to volatile food prices.

Officials at the WTO and leaders of several governments have launched what is said to be a “last-ditch effort” to save the Doha development round of trade negotiations from what is seen as imminent collapse. Will it collapse? And does it matter if it does? Or in other words, what is the likelihood of such a deal, and how much would it benefit developing countries? The brief answers are: low and very little.

So far, the finger-pointing for the failure has been directed either at the US (in which domestic politics suggests little appetite for external trade negotiations), or the newly significant large emerging economies such as China, Brazil and India (that are less willing to accept what are seen as unequal terms), or the overall impact of the “Great Recession” (which has made more countries wary of trade openness that could undermine domestic production and employment).

One aspect that is less talked about is the impact of the WTO Agreement on agriculture and food security in the developing world. The apathy or even downright cynicism in such quarters towards a new trade deal can be understood if we examine this. Basically, many developing countries are now more food-insecure than ever before, and at least part of that can be related to recent trade patterns.

Read the full article at the Guardian.

Riding the Commodities Roller Coaster: Look, Ma, no hands!

Jayati Ghosh

Ma, why do we have futures markets?

We have them because there are all sorts of goods that people know that they will need to buy or sell in the future, say six months from now, and they want to be sure they can buy them at a certain price. Economists call this “hedging” against the risk that the price can change in a way that you may not be prepared for.

Which kinds of goods are these?

There can be futures markets in almost anything. They first started with agricultural commodities like rice and wheat, because no one could know exactly what the harvest would be like and so it helped some people to choose a price to buy or sell at in advance. Now futures markets cover not just agricultural commodities but also minerals and oil and metals, and also lots of other goods. And even some services!

So these futures markets stabilize prices?

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Good News on the Right to Food

Timothy A. Wise

Those of us advocating for changes in global and national policies on food and agriculture just got some good news. The UN Human Rights Council just renewed for another three years the mandate of Olivier De Schutter as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

If you haven’t followed De Schutter’s work since the 2007-8 food price spikes brought renewed attention to the issues of hunger and agricultural development, he has been a clear and uncompromising voice for change. His rights-based approach has taken him well beyond the withering rise of hunger to the roots of the global crisis, linking climate change, agribusiness concentration, commodity speculation, and the ongoing debates of industrial versus agro-ecological development.

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Food Price Volatility: What Was and Wasn’t Said in the Leaked Report to the G-20

Jennifer Clapp

Triple Crisis is pleased to welcome Jennifer Clapp as a regular blogger.

Despite the slight dip in the FAO food price index in March, global food prices still remain 37 percent higher than they were at this time last year. In this context, eyes are fixed on the upcoming G­20 meetings where France, as host, has pledged global leadership on the issue of commodity price volatility.

A confidential draft report prepared by 9 international organizations for the G­20, leaked in late March, gives us a glimpse into the analysis on volatility in food and agricultural markets that informs the G­20.

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The Transmission of Global Food Prices

Triple Crisis bloggers C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh published the following article for International Development Economics Associates (IDEAs) on the high transmission of recent international food price changes to domestic food prices in many developing countries.

Clearly, we are back in another phase of sharply rising global food prices, which is wreaking further devastation on populations in developing countries that have already been ravaged by several years of rising prices and falling employment chances. The food price index of the FAO in December 2010 surpassed its previous peak of June 2008, the month that is still thought of as the extreme peak of the world food crisis.

Some of the biggest increases have come in the prices of sugar and edible oils. But even staple prices have shown sharp increases, with the biggest increase in wheat prices, which doubled in the second half of 2010 and have been increasing since then. Rice prices have been relatively stable in global trade over the past year in comparison, but are still much higher (by around 48 per cent) than they were at the start of 2008.

Read the full article at IDEAs.

Commodity Market Reform: Wall Street versus the regulators

Steve Suppan, Guest Blogger

In contrast to the rapidity with which governments moved to use taxpayer funds to rescue the “too big to fail banks” in 2008, the pace of financial and commodity market reform since then has been agonizingly slow. One factor frustrating re-regulation is financial industry resistance to reform, aided in the United States by Republican Party efforts to reimburse the financiers of their November 2010 electoral victory with initiatives to defund the regulatory agencies responsible for implementing the “Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.”

Before dawn on February 19, the House of Representatives voted to slash the budget of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission by a third. “There would essentially be no cop on the beat,” CFTC Commission Michael Dunn said at a February 23 Senate hearing. CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler had told a House finance committee hearing that such a cut would not only cripple the CFTC’s ability to implement Dodd-Frank reforms, but would prevent his agency from investigating Ponzi schemes and market manipulation. The U.S. Senate is unlikely to support the House Republican assault on regulation, but the Obama administration’s proposal to levy a transaction fee to finance CFTC implementation and enforcement is facing stiff opposition.

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The Food Aid Convention: Feeding people or balancing budgets?

Jennifer Clapp, Guest Blogger

The week of February 28 is an important one for the future of international food aid. Negotiators from member countries of the Food Aid Convention (FAC) are meeting to hammer out details of a new agreement. The FAC is an obscure international treaty that dates back to 1967 under which donors pledge a certain amount of food aid. It is the only international agreement where donors pledge to provide a minimum amount of aid.

Last renegotiated in 1999, the FAC is now more than 10 years out of date. It was supposed to have been updated in 2001, but instead has limped from extension to extension on the hopes that the Doha Round of trade talks, which include new rules on food aid, would be completed first. Finally, following a major food crisis in 2007-08 and continued food price volatility, donors have realized that the FAC must be updated to take the new situation into account, even in the absence of a Doha agreement.

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The coming crisis of renewed soaring food prices

Martin Khor

The events in Egypt that incredibly propelled President Mubarak out of power after 18 days of protests have surprised everyone, probably Egyptians too.

The main reason for the protests was political, the yearning of the people for the ending of repression and for a new era of democracy. But part of the anger of the people, especially the young, arose from serious economic and social problems. Poverty has been growing in recent years, affecting one in four people. Unemployment jumped to 10% while the rate was one-third for young men.

And then there are the increasing prices of food.  Food accounts for almost half the average Egyptian household expenditure. In 2008 there were riots in Egypt over the rising price of bread, which was part of the dramatic global food price inflation in that year.  The global recession ended that round of inflation, but in recent months the prices of foods and other commodities have been jumping up again.

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