Food price volatility and the world's poor
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An October 13 New York Times headline article warned that an increasing volatile market for grains could lead to a repeat of the 2008 food price run-up. That price spike left over 1 billion people in a state of food insecurity-a threshold symbolic in its extreme order of magnitude and in the challenges it presents for combating global hunger in the future. In a paper released December 20 in Population and Development Review FSE director Rosamond L. Naylor and deputy director Walter P. Falcon provide insight into the causes and consequences of these volatile events.
"Price variability, particularly spikes, has enormous impacts on the rural poor who spend a majority of their income on food and have minimal savings," said Naylor. "Impacts at the local level have not been well measured, yet are key to improving food security globally."
Expectations--often faulty--have played a key role in price volatility over the past decade. Uncertain exchange rates and macro policies added to price misperceptions, as did flurries of speculative activity in organized futures markets, particularly as a result of the growing biofuels market.
"These events highlight new linkages between agriculture-energy and agriculture-finance markets that affect the world food economy today," explained Falcon. "More importantly, volatile markets compound problems of low crop productivity, increase reliance on food imports, and aggravate other internal causes of instability--conflict, weak institutions, and inadequate infrastructure--that typically plague the world's poorest countries."
To see how the rural poor were impacted on a local scale, Naylor and Falcon looked at Ghana, Uganda, Malawi, Guatemala, and India. Price changes at the local level during the 2008 price spike were frequently half that of international prices, primarily as a consequence of domestic food and trade policies.
"The price bubble was undeniably grim for poor consumers, particularly for households living under $1/day or $2/day, but not as debilitating as many commentators suggested," said Falcon. "Unfortunately, most price stabilization efforts aimed at the poor, however well intended, ended up helping larger net producers much more than those at the margin."
Additionally, domestic self-sufficiency polices tended to have long-term negative impacts on the international market when governments lacked the resources to defend a targeted price or were ‘large actors' with significant shares of global production or consumption.
For example, in the spring of 2008, the Indian government placed a ban on rice exports--a major staple in the country--when it feared significant increases in grain prices and a spread of Ug99 (wheat rust). This ban affected food prices from Asia to Africa, created mini-panics within food importing countries, and added to global grain price variability. It underscored the growing food-security and crop interdependencies among nations arising from pathogens, prices, and policies.
The extreme heat wave that hit Russia and Eastern Europe in the summer of 2010, coupled with floods in Pakistan, declining estimates of maize stocks in the U.S., and uncertainties about global GDP growth have captured the attention of many analysts and policymakers. What will happen to prices in terms of spikes, trends, and variations during 2011-2013 and beyond is uncertain.
What is known, said Naylor, is that the causes and consequences of food-price variability deserve much more attention if we are going to alleviate global food insecurity in the future.
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Survival Migration: Old Institutions, New Challenges
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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Alexander Betts
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Alexander.Betts@politics.ox.ac.uk
Postdoctoral Fellow
Dr. Alexander Betts is the Hedley Bull research fellow in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, where he is also director of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Global Migration Governance project. He received his MPhil (with distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the international politics of refugee protection and migration. His main academic focus is on understanding the conditions under which international cooperation takes place in the refugee regime and other areas of migration. In particular, the theoretical focus of his work is on the dynamics of international institutions: on a ‘horizontal' level (across issue-areas and policy fields) and on a ‘vertical' level (between the global and the national level). He has worked on a range of policy issues including forced migration and development, protracted refugee situations, and the protection of vulnerable irregular migrants. His research has a geographical focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and he has carried out extensive fieldwork across the region, including in South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and the DRC. He has taught a range of graduate courses including ‘International Relations Theory', ‘International Relations of the Developing World' and ‘Forced Migration and International Relations'. He is on the Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM). He has previously worked for UNHCR, and been a consultant to UNHCR, IOM, and the Council of Europe.
(Profile last updated in September 2011.)
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Brenna Powell
Predoctoral Fellow, CISAC; PhD Candidate, Harvard University
Commentator
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Israel’s 1979 Nuclear Test and the U.S. Cover-Up
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First paragraph of the article:
In the wake of the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, the United States launched a series of satellites under the name Vela (after a constellation in the southern hemisphere sometimes called “the sails” because of its configuration). The Vela satellites were designed to monitor compliance with the treaty by detecting clandestine nuclear tests either in space or in the atmosphere. The first such satellite was launched in 1963, the last in 1969. They operated by measuring X-rays, neutrons and gamma rays, and, in the case of the more advanced units, emissions of light using two photodiode sensors called bhangmeters (derived from the Indian word for cannabis). These satellites had a nominal life of seven years, after which the burden of detection was to be shifted to a new series of satellites under the Defense Support Program (DSP), equipped with infra-red detectors designed to pick up missile launches as well as nuclear tests. The Vela satellites, however, kept operating long past the end of their nominal design life and one of them, designated Vela 6911, detected an event on September 22, 1979, that has become a subject of intense interest ever since.
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Middle East Policy Journal
Modelling farmers’ adaptations strategies to climate change and variability. The case of the Limpopo Basin, South Africa
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This paper examines climate adaptation strategies of farmers in the Limpopo Basin of South Africa. Survey results show that while many farmers noticed long-term changes in temperature and precipitation, most could not take remedial action. Lack of access to credit and water were cited as the main factors inhibiting adaptation. Common adaptation responses reported included diversifying crops, changing varieties and planting dates, using irrigation, and supplementing livestock feed. A multinomial logit analysis of climate adaptation responses suggests that access to water, credit, extension services and off-farm income and employment opportunities, tenure security, farmers' asset base and farming experience are key to enhancing farmers' adaptive capacity. This implies that appropriate government interventions to improve farmers' access to and the status of these factors are needed for reducing vulnerability of farmers to climate adversities in such arid areas.
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Agrekon
Eric Huang
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305
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tigeric@stanford.edu
Visiting Scholar, 2010-2011
Eric Huang is a visiting scholar at CDDRL (Oct. 2010- June 2011) from Taiwan and is currently serving as the Secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of China (Taiwan). Prior to his current assignment in San Francisco, he served as the Unit Chief in the International Security Unit Research and Planning Committee at the Ministry. His previous oversea posts were in Hawaii and Cape Town, South Africa.
Mr. Huang received his B.A. from the Department of Diplomacy at National Cheng Chi University and a M.A. from American University.
Human Rights Education in India
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As human rights education (HRE) becomes a more common feature of international policy discussions, national textbook reforms, and grassroots educational strategies worldwide, greater clarity about what HRE is, does, and means is needed. This presentation reviews existing definitions and models of HRE and offers a case study of one non-governmental organization's (NGO) approach to school-based instruction in India. Specifically, findings are presented on how household-, school-, and community-level factors mediated students' understandings of HRE. Data suggest that a variety of factors at the three levels contribute to the HRE program's successful implementation in government schools serving marginalized students (where most NGO programs are in operation in India today).
Professor Monisha Bajaj has been a faculty member in the Department of International and Transcultural Studies at Teachers College, Columbia University since 2005. She teaches in the Programs in International and Comparative Education and advises students in the concentrations of peace education, international humanitarian issues in education, and African education. Her interests are in the areas of comparative and international education, peace and human rights education, the politics of education, social inequalities, critical pedagogy, and curriculum development in the U.S. and abroad. She has focused on research and programmatic work in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America & the Caribbean, and the United States.
Prof. Bajaj received her Ed.D. at Teachers College, Columbia University in International Educational Development, and her M.A. in Latin American Studies and B.A. in Sociology at Stanford University. She has previously worked in the field of human rights and developed a teacher training manual on human rights education for UNESCO while studying as a Fulbright scholar in the Dominican Republic. She has also consulted on curriculum development issues, particularly related to the incorporation of peace education, human rights, and sustainable development, for non-profit educational service providers in New York City and inter-governmental organizations, such as UNICEF. Her professional work focuses on examining possibilities for formal and non-formal education to influence social change.
Support for Prof. Bajaj's visit comes from the Charles F. Riddell Fund, administered by the Office of Residential Education, Stanford University.
Co-sponsors for this event are the Bechtel International Center; the Center for Ethics in Society; the Center for South Asia; the Education and Society Theme (EAST) House; the International Comparative Education Program of the Stanford University School of Education; and the Program on Human Rights at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.
CERAS 204
Monisha Bajaj
Professor
Speaker
Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Columbia University
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Nathan Eagle on mobile phone usage in the developing world
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Nathan Eagle, Founder and CEO of txteagle spoke at the weekly Liberation Technology Seminar Series on Dececember 2, 2010 about mobile phone usage in the developing world.
Although txteagle began in 2007 as a purely academic project, the current goal of the company and of its founder and CEO, Nathan Eagle, is to give one billion people a five percent raise. In his presentation, Eagle described the context for which txteagle was designed, how the company's focus has evolved over the past three years, and what steps the company is taking to move closer to achieving this goal in the future.
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Mobile applications developed as a part of MIT's Entrepreneurial Research on Programming and Research on Mobiles (EPROM) project offered some insights into the potential of mobile-based tools. In Rwanda, where electricity is a prepaid service, one of Eagle's former students quickly cornered a significant share of the market by creating scratch cards for crediting one's electricity bill via mobile phone. In Eastern Kenya, a program called SMS Blood Bank was created to enable real time monitoring of blood supplies at local district hospitals in Eastern Kenya. Although SMS reporting of low blood levels resolved the huge amount of latency in the system of local district hospitals (where responses to dips in supply had typically taken up to 4 weeks), the price of reporting blood levels via SMS represented a pay cut for local nurses; despite nurses' initial enthusiasm, SMS reporting tapered off within weeks. When the idea of sending about 10 cents of airtime to compensate nurses for each SMS report of blood level data proved a success, the model behind txteagle was born.
Designed as a means to monetize people's downtime, txteagle has grown rapidly through partnerships with over 220 mobile operators in about 80 countries around the world. In turn for helping these operators analyze their customer data, txteagle has gained access to about 2.1 billion mobile subscribers. Partnering with txteagle is a winning proposition for mobile operators, since the airtime compensation mobile subscribers receive from txteagle improves operators' Average Revenue per User (ARPU), a statistic that had been plummeting as more and more poor people became mobile phone users. By enabling people to carry out work via web browsers or SMS and compensating them via mobile money or airtime, txteagle has become a market leader at efficiently gathering data in the developing world.
Since txteagle was first created, the company has attempted to move from an outsourcing/back-office model to an emphasis on work that leverages a person's unique local knowledge and information. Typically outsourced tasks such as forms processing, audio transcription, inventory management, data cleaning, tagging, and internet search, tend to be less rewarding to the worker. By focusing on local data instead, txteagle enables unprecedented insight into emerging markets, all while optimizing engagement with local customers. Typical tasks include: maps and directions, local market prices and businesses, survey research and polling, and other forms of local knowledge gathering.
One of txteagle's central initiatives, GroundTruth, leverages this local knowledge-based model to carry out better market research. Today, global brands are already spending about $125 billion annually in emerging markets to engage the "next billion," but they typically carry out this research in a sub-optimal way. Through the txteagle platform, Eagle suggests, brands and organizations can use advertising money to design better products and services, conduct market research, and carry out brand engagement. Recent success cases include the use of txteagle to help a program of the United Nations to reach survey respondents directly and to enable the World Bank to obtain better local market price data at lower cost.
Although txteagle's rapid growth and early successes have been encouraging, the company has ambitious goals for the next two years. The company began by focusing on outside sales through its GroundTruth market research program. Next year, the company hopes to generate syndicated data and ultimately to create a self-source platform enabling anyone to conduct their own population-level surveys. By continuing to focus on improving the quality of both their data and workers over time, txteagle aims to have an even greater positive impact on the incomes of the hundreds of millions of mobile phone users at the base of the pyramid.
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Yihana von Ritter
CDDRL
616 Serra St.
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305
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yritter@stanford.edu
CDDRL Honors Student, 2010-2011
Determining Impacts on the Implementation of AIDS/HIV Programs in Papua New Guinea
No Picnic: The Dynamics of Culture in the Contemporary Arab World
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In this analysis of the region, Hicham Ben Abdallah points out that, while political issues are important to understanding the authoritarian political structures of the Arab world, it is also important to understand the dynamics of culture. Ben Abdallah demonstrates the proliferation of cultural practices through which societies and individuals learn to live in a complex mix of parallel and conflicting ideological tendencies -- with the increasing Islamicization of everyday ideology developing alongside the proliferation of secular forms of cultural production, while both negotiate for breathing room under the aegis of an authoritarian state.
He describes how the state takes advantage of a segmented cultural scene by posing as a restraint against the extremes of the salafist norm, while channeling modernist cultural expression into safe institutional and patronage reward systems and into a commercialized process of "festivalization," all of which celebrate a depoliticized "Arab" identity.
Hicham Ben Abdallah refers us to the deep history of Islam, which protected divergent cultural and intellectual influences as the patrimony of mankind. He suggests a new cultural paradigm, inspired by this history while understanding the necessity for political democratization and cultural modernism. We must, he argues, be unafraid to face the challenges implied in the tension between the growing influence of a salafist norm and the widespread embrace of implicitly secular cultural practices throughout the Arab world.
Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui received a B.A. in Politics from Princeton University, and an M.A in Politics from Stanford University. He recently founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation for Social Science Research on North Africa and the Middle East, and serves as its Director.
Through this Foundation he has established the Program on Good Governance and Political Reform in the Arab World, at The Freeman Spogli Institute's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Hicham Ben Abdallah is a member of the Advisory Board of the Freeman Spogli Institute.
He has also recently founded a program in Global Climate Change, Democracy and Human Security (known as the "Climate Change and Democracy Project), in the Division of Social Sciences, Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In 1994, at Princeton University, Hicham Ben Abdallah endowed the Institute for the Trans-regional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia. This Institute has become an important venue for study and debate on the region.
Hicham Ben Abdallah is also active in global humanitarian and social issues. He serves on the Human Rights Watch Board of Directors for the Middle East and North Africa. He has worked with the Carter Center on a number of initiatives, including serving as an international observer with the Carter Center delegations during elections in Palestine in 1996 and 2006, and in Nigeria in 2000. In 2000, he served as Principal Officer for Community Affairs with the United Nations Mission in Kosovo .
Hicham Ben Abdallah is also an entrepreneur in the domain of renewable energy. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, develops projects that produce clean energy at competitive prices. He has implemented several of these projects in Asia, Europe and North America.
CISAC Conference Room
Hicham Ben Abdallah
CDDRL
Stanford University
Encina Hall
616 Serra Street
Stanford, CA 94305-6055
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ate@stanford.edu
Consulting Professor
Hicham Ben Abdallah received his B.A. in Politics in 1985 from Princeton University, and his M.A. in Political Science from Stanford in 1997. His interest is in the politics of the transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
He has lectured in numerous universities and think tanks in North America and Europe. His work for the advancement of peace and conflict resolution has brought him to Kosovo as a special Assistant to Bernard Kouchner, and to Nigeria and Palestine as an election observer with the Carter Center. He has published in journals such Le Monde, Le Monde Diplomatique,Pouvoirs, Le Debat, The Journal of Democracy, The New York Times, El Pais, and El Quds.
In 2010 he has founded the Moulay Hicham Foundation which conducts social science research on the MENA region. He is also an entrepreneur with interests in agriculture, real estate, and renewable energies. His company, Al Tayyar Energy, has a number of clean energy projects in Asia and Europe.
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