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251. International responses to Pakistan's water crisis: opportunities and challenges

Author:
Michael Kugelman
Publication Date:
11-2010
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
Norwegian Centre for Conflict Resolution
Abstract:
Pakistan faces a multidimensional water crisis that claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year. The root causes of the crisis are twofold: circumstantial, which are linked to poor water-resource management policies (including water-wasting flood irrigation) structural, tied to factors deeply ingrained in politics and society such as the obsession with India, inequitable rural land-ownership and endemic water misgovernance (for example, exploitation of the rotational irrigation system to the detriment of the poor). To resolve the crisis, both types of cause will need to be tackled, and the international community can play an invaluable role.
Topic:
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Water
Political Geography:
Pakistan and India

252. Globalization and Scarcity: Multilateralism for a world with limits

Author:
Alex Evans
Publication Date:
11-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center on International Cooperation
Abstract:
Globalization has improved the living standards of hundreds of millions of people – but growing resource scarcity means it risks becoming a victim of its own success. Left unaddressed, scarcity of food, energy, water, land and other key 'natural assets' has the potential to trigger intensifying zero sum competition between states – in the process, increasing poverty, state fragility, economic instability, inflation, and strategic resource competition between major powers.
Topic:
Security, Agriculture, Economics, Energy Policy, Environment, Globalization, Natural Resources, Water, and Food
Political Geography:
Global Focus

253. Supermarkets, Modern Supply Chains, and the Changing Food Policy Agenda

Author:
Peter Timmer
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
There is great interest among policy makers in how to influence the behavior of supermarkets in ways that serve the interests of important groups in society, especially small farmers and the owners of traditional, small-scale food wholesale and retail facilities. Two broader issues are also important: (1) finding a way for food prices to “internalize” the full environmental costs of production and marketing; and (2) finding a way for supermarkets to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, to the health problems generated by an “affluent” diet and lifestyle. There are concerns over the growing concentration in global food retailing and the potential market power that concentration implies. But the evidence of fierce competition at the retail level, and the high contestability for food consumers' dollars, have kept this issue in the background.
Topic:
Agriculture, Markets, Political Economy, Post Colonialism, and Third World

254. Rice Crisis Forensics: How Asian Governments Carelessly Set the World Rice Market on Fire

Author:
Tom Slayton
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
The world rice market was aflame last spring and for several months it looked as if the trading edifice that had exhibited such resilience over the last two decades was going to burn to the ground. World prices trebled within less than four months and reached a 30- year inflation-adjusted high. Many market observers thought the previous record set in 1974 would soon be toast. The fire was man-made, not the result of natural developments. While the governments in India, Vietnam, and the Philippines did not to set the world market on fire, that was the unintended result of their actions which threatened both innocent bystanders (low-income rice importers as far away as Africa and Latin America) and, ultimately, poor rice consumers at home. This paper describes what sparked the fire and the accelerants that made a bad situation nearly catastrophic. Fortuitously, when the flames were raging at peak intensity, rain clouds appeared, the winds [market psychology] shifted, and conditions on the ground improved, allowing the fire to die down. It remains to be seen, however, if the trading edifice has been seriously undermined by the actions of decision makers in several key Asian rice exporting and importing countries. In describing the cascading negative effects of these seemingly rational domestic policies, this paper aims to help policy makers in the rice exporting and importing nations to avoid a repeat of the disastrous price spike of 2008.
Topic:
Agriculture, Economics, Health, Humanitarian Aid, Markets, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Africa, India, Asia, and Latin America

255. Coping with Rising Food Prices: Policy Dilemmas in the Developing World

Author:
Nora Lustig
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
Rising food prices cause considerable policy dilemmas for developing country governments. Letting domestic prices adjust to reflect the full change in international prices generates inflationary pressures and causes severe hardship for poor households lacking access to social safety nets. Alternatively, governments can use food subsidies or export restrictions to stabilize domestic prices, yet this exacerbates global food price increases and undermines a rules-based trading system. The recent episode shows that many countries chose to shift the burden of adjustment back to international markets. The use of corn and oilseed for the production of biofuel will result in a recurrence of such episodes in the foreseeable future.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Humanitarian Aid, and Markets

256. Revenue effects of participation in smallholder organic cocoa production in tropical Africa: A case study

Author:
Sam Jones, Peter Gibbon, and Yumiao Lin
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
This paper examines the revenue effects of certified organic contract farming and of use of organic farming methods in a tropical African context. These are compared with 'organic by default' conventional farming systems without contractual relations. Survey data from a medium-size cocoa-vanilla contract farming scheme in Uganda is reported using a standard OLS regression and propensity score matching approaches. The analysis finds that there are positive revenue effects for the certified crops from both participation and, more modestly, from using organic farming techniques.
Topic:
Agriculture, Economics, and International Trade and Finance
Political Geography:
Africa

257. European Food Safety Regulation and the Developing Countries: Regulatory problems and possibilities

Author:
Morten Broberg
Publication Date:
06-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
This paper examines the European Community's food safety regime in order to identify those legal measures that cause the most problems for developing countries' exporters of food products and to point to possible solutions. It is shown that barriers ma y arise due to an array of requirements, some of which may appear to be rather minor legal amendments, such as changing a sampling plan. There is no easy solution to this problem, but three specific measures are proposed: Firstly, improved harmonisation of food safety measures in the industrialised countries. Secondly, when proposing new food safety measures the European Commission should identify the proposal's likely consequences on developing countries – and should explain how alternative measures will affect both food safety and the developing countries. And lastly, the European Community should strengthen its provision of development assistance to enable the developing countries to comply with the food safety standards.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, International Trade and Finance, Third World, and Food
Political Geography:
Europe

258. Foreign Direct Investment in Blantyre, Malawi: Opportunities and Challenges

Author:
Sawa Nakagawa, Abhinav Bahl, Meron Demisse, Megumi Ishizuka, Francisco Miranda, and Kwi Young Sung
Publication Date:
04-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment
Abstract:
The Earth Institute at Columbia University launched the Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI), an urban counterpart to the Millennium Villages Project (MVP), to assist nine mid-sized cities across sub-Saharan Africa in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). MCI provides research and policy analysis to the cities in order to attract foreign direct investment (FDI). Increased FDI flows create employment opportunities by fostering local enterprise development and sustainable economic growth. In addition, MCI is helping the Millennium Cities to carry out needs assessments in a number of social sectors. The data from these assessments will enable MCI to generate integrated City Development Strategies to help each city meet the MDGs.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, and Foreign Direct Investment
Political Geography:
Africa, United States, and United Kingdom

259. Rice Price Formation in the Short Run and the Long Run

Author:
C. Peter Timmer
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Center for Global Development
Abstract:
This paper analyzes price formation on the world's rice market using simple supply and demand models as a start, but moving to “supply of storage” models—a staple of commodity-market analysis for more than half a century—to explain hoarding behavior and its subsequent impact on prices. The supply of storage model, however, does not account adequately for the influence that “outside” speculators have on prices. This paper quantifies the impact of financial factors and actors on commodity-price formation using very short-run prices and Granger causality analysis for a wide range of financial and commodity markets, including rice. The results are highly preliminary but are also very provocative. Speculative money seems to surge in and out of commodity markets, strongly linking financial variables with commodity prices during some time periods, but these periods are often short and the relationships disappear for long periods of time. Finally, the paper addresses the long-run (since 1900) relationships among the prices of the three basic cereal staples, rice, wheat and corn (maize), which have declined more than 1 percent per year over the past century. The decline accelerated after the mid-1980s; only the recent run-up in cereal prices in 2007–08 returned them to the long-run downward trend. Despite these common features and important cross-commodity linkages, however, price formation for rice has several unique dimensions worthy of further study.
Topic:
Agriculture, Markets, Food, and Financial Crisis

260. The Environmental Impacts of Soybean Expansion And Infrastructure Development in Brazil's Amazon Basin

Author:
Maria del Carmen Vera-Diaz, Robert K. Kaufmann, and Daniel C. Nepstad
Publication Date:
05-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University
Abstract:
For decades, the development of transportation infrastructure in the Brazilian Amazon has been the government's main social and economic development policy in the region. Reductions in transportation costs have not only opened the agricultural frontier to cattle ranching and logging but have also caused more than two-thirds of Amazonian deforestation. Currently, soybean cultivation is a new economic force demanding improvements to roads in the region. Profitable soybean crops have spread over the Mato Grosso's cerrados and now head toward the core of the Amazon rain forest. One of the main constraints for soy expansion into the Amazon has been the poor condition of roads. In this study, we analyze the effect Amazon transportation infrastructure programs have on soybean expansion by lowering transport costs. The analysis is based on spatial estimates of transportation costs for the soybean sector, first using current road networks and then projecting changes based on the paving of the Cuiabá-Santarém road. Our results indicate that paving the Cuiabá-Santarém road would reduce transportation costs by an average of $10 per ton for farmers located in the northern part of Mato Grosso, by allowing producers to reroute soybean shipments to the Santarém port. Paving the road also would expand the area where growing soybeans is economically feasible by about 70 percent, from 120,000 to 205,000 km2 . Most of this new area would be located in the state of Pará and is covered largely by forests. A Cost-Benefit analysis of the road project indicates that the investments in infrastructure would generate more than $180 million for soybean farmers over a period of twenty years. These benefits, however, ignore the project's environmental impacts. If the destruction of ecological services and products provided by the existing forests is accounted for, then the Cuiabá-Santarém investment would generate a net loss of between $762 million and $1.9 billion. This result shows the importance of including the value of the natural capital in feasibility studies of infrastructure projects to reflect their real benefits to society as a whole.
Topic:
Agriculture, Development, Economics, Environment, and Infrastructure
Political Geography:
Brazil, Latin America, and Amazon Basin