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- Links 5/24/14
- Global Food Security Needs States to Ally with Family Farmers
- Financial Times Finds “Many” Errors in Piketty Analysis, Argues They Undermine His Thesis
| Posted: 24 May 2014 03:55 AM PDT World’s Prettiest Tarantula Takes Best in Show 2014 Natural Geographic. A Richard Smith find. Do biologists really need dead animals? Article inflames debate. Christian Science Monitor 5 food additives more disgusting than 'pink slime' MarketWatch Apple in Gigantic marketing cock up TechEye (EM) Did the internet prevent all invention from moving to one place? VoxEU China cannot follow America's route to world leadership Financial Times U.S. Gains in a Spat With China Over Tariffs New York Times Thai coup leader tightens grip Asia Times Is troubled Thailand tumbling into civil war? Aljazeera European Parliament Elections: Our choice between Euro-loyalists, Euro-sceptics & Euro-critics Yanis Varoufakis Suddenly The EU’s Break-Up Has Moved From A Possibility To A Near-Certainty Forbes (Bob H) Iran Offers Data on Detonators, Atomic Agency Says New York Times Ukraine
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
US ‘must force-feed Gitmo inmate’ Guardian Single Payer Advocates: How Do We Defeat Health Care for Profit? Truthout Elon Musk says he lost a multi-billion-dollar contract when SpaceX didn't hire a public official Quartz (Chuck L) FACING THE TRUTH: THE CASE FOR REPARATIONS Bill Moyers with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Oregon's GMO Sellout Rebekah Wilce, Firedoglake (jo6pak) Hillary Clinton’s Speaking Circuit Payday: $5 Million (and Counting) Economic Policy Journal (rich) Geithner Pants on Fire
New Home Sales “Better, Not Strong”, and Regionally Very Uneven: US +6.7%, Midwest +47.4%, Northeast -26.7% Michael Shedlock Class Warfare
The myth of the omnipotent central bank Frances Coppola The threat facing online comments Financial Times. Hah, FT Alphaville struggles with comment moderation too, and they have way more staff than we do! Antidote du jour (Lance N):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here. |
| Global Food Security Needs States to Ally with Family Farmers Posted: 24 May 2014 12:16 AM PDT Yves here. If you live in an advanced economy, and are at least middle income, you probably don’t give much thought to the availability of food. These countries, on the whole, suffer more from the consequences of excess, in the form of diabetes and orthopedic issues among the aging that are exacerbated by being heavy, than from hunger or nutritional deficiencies. Yet food prices are rising. With weather and even seasons moving considerably out of line with historical norms, and with the oceans already suffering from overfishing, access to food and the relative cost in the form of inputs of various types of food is likely to become a much bigger political issue than it has been for decades. The driver of the Arab Spring revolts were rising food and fuel costs that pushed significant numbers from being on the right side to the wrong side of survival. Even in the sheltered US, the drought in California means more costly meals or trading “down” in terms of finding cheaper substitutes. One of the issues that is seldom discussed is food security. I find it curious the degree to which national leaders have become comfortable with making their countries less self-sufficient in the name of promoting trade. That is not to say that trade is bad, but neither is trade inherently virtuous. The gains from trade need to be weighed against costs and risk. Small countries, or ones in regions with short growing seasons may never have been self-sufficient, particularly in food (Jared Diamond in his book Collapse uses Montana as an example of an society inherently dependent on imports from the rest of the world). But for ones that were reasonably close to self-sufficiency, the choice to accede to the demands of agricultural exporters like the US and hollow out domestic food production may prove to have been short-sighted. Our house Japan expert Clive points out that Japan’s long-standing insistence of protecting most of its generally uncompetitive agricultural industry isn’t simply about catering to a powerful voting block. Japan still remembers the “starving times” of the later days of World War II and its immediate aftermath and does not want to take any more risk on the food front than it needs to. This post focuses on agribusiness as a driver of food insecurity. Many studies have found that even with global population at its present level, the driver of hunger isn’t the amount of food production but its distribution. And as NC readers regularly point out, more emphasis on local food production also reduces the use of other resources, like fuel for transport and often packaging. By Sylvia Kay, a researcher at Transnational Institute (TNI). She works on a wide range of issues including land grabbing, water, and agricultural investment. Cross posted from Triple Crisis South Africa's most famous cleric, Desmond Tutu, in his inimitable style, once said, "If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." His blunt speaking has particular relevance to important negotiations taking place in Rome this week at the United Nations Committee on World Food Security, which will define principles for "responsible agricultural investment" (known as RAI) in the context of an ongoing food crisis and an unprecedented wave of land grabbing. When it comes to agriculture and food, the elephant is agribusiness. Just three companies control 50% of the commercial seed market; only four companies control 75% of the global trade in grains and soya. Their argument is that the state's role should be that of a neutral broker, encouraging primarily private investment in agriculture. They are willing to accept guidelines for "responsible investment," but within a model that sees ever increasing levels of foreign direct investment and the deepening and further integration of national agricultural sectors into global commodity chains and markets. Theirs is essentially a business-as-usual approach which seeks to retrofit the RAI principles to existing agribusiness initiatives. While such principles will boost the profits of some corporations, the evidence shows that it will not deliver on the CFS mandate to realise the right to adequate food for all. One in eight people in the world are currently undernourished—and this has worsened in recent years. In fact, reliance on global markets led to global food prices in 2007 rising to levels in real terms not witnessed since 1846. This has not only added between 130 to 150 million people to those living in extreme poverty, it has also fueled an unprecedented wave of land grabbing across the global South by governments seeking security from food riots and corporations seeking profits from perceived scarcity. The mice in this case are the small-holder farmers who often had their land seized or appropriated. But they are not just victims; they also provide the most progressive solutions for food security. There are an estimated 500 million smallholder farms in the developing world which provide livelihoods for 2 billion people and produce about 80% of the food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. It is these small farmers who truly contribute to global food security. Any international negotiation that looks at "responsible agricultural investment" should start with how to support rather than dispossess these small-scale food producers. A report by Transnational Institute, Reclaiming Agricultural Investment, recently studied working alternatives of state-peasant collaboration from Brazil to Ghana, the United States to Thailand. The studies show that when the state sets the right policies and provides investment in support of small-scale food producers, it can have remarkable results. Brazil's Zero Hunger programme, which combines elements of public health, nutrition, social protection, education, and livelihood promotion, has been one of the major factors behind the country's impressive improvement in the standard of living over the past decade. The Zero Hunger programme successfully opened up new markets for smallholder farmers and championed national food security. Under the School Meals programme for example, each Brazilian municipality receives a daily subsidy for each student with the requirement that 70% of the municipalities' procurements should be staple, non-processed foods, with 30% of the food coming from local family farms. Government support for sustainable, agro-ecological farming techniques, practiced by small farmers, can also reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment and climate. Indian government support for the system of sustainable rice intensification (SRI), which involves the use of organic fertiliser and a diversified set of agro-ecological practices, has led record yields. Despite this, SRI has been ignored by the conventional rice research establishment and the private R&D industry, as it threatens the interests of agribusiness suppliers. It is often presumed that state support for small-scale food producers entails higher prices and costs for consumers. However, using public policy tools in a flexible manner can ensure that both groups benefit. Some of the most effective strategies for dealing with the food crisis, for instance, have involved the use of public stocks and the setting of minimum farm prices for producers and maximum consumer prices for key staple commodities. In Indonesia, these measures ensured that the price of rice actually decreased in 2008 while it was escalating in neighbouring countries. Business as usual is not an option. It is time for states to end a false neutrality and take sides. Instead of investing in a model which is at its core anti-democratic and likely to further entrench a state of "agropoly" in which a handful of the largest processors, traders, and retailers control the world food system, governments should commit to RAI principles that strengthen the position of the world's family farmers and advance the cause of food sovereignty. |
| Financial Times Finds “Many” Errors in Piketty Analysis, Argues They Undermine His Thesis Posted: 23 May 2014 11:23 PM PDT On what would normally be a very quiet Friday evening, the Financial Times has managed to stir up a significant controversy involving Thomas Piketty’s widely-lauded book, Capital in the 21st Century. Unlike many economists, Piketty provided an online annex and his spreadsheets, which showed the sources he relied on. According to authors Chris Giles and Ferdinando Giugliano:
The article discusses the sorts of errors it found in more detail, including what look like data entry errors, unexplained one-off adjustments to data, weightings used in averaging different data sets, and inconsistent time periods used in comparisons. The pink paper argued that two major claims in Piketty’s book, that the concentration in wealth had increased after 1970, and that the share held at the top was greater in the US than in Europe, was absent when his data was corrected. The Financial Times story had more of a “gotcha” tone that one expects to see in the mainstream media, and compared the mistakes to the famous spreadsheet errors in Carmen Reinhart’s and Kenneth Rogoff’s work on debt to GDP ratios. But at least so far, there is a key difference: only one other study had found results similar to the those claimed by Reinhart and Rogoff. By contrast, Piketty is far from alone in finding rising concentrations of wealth at the very top; Demos points out that a new study published by Garbriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez paints a post-war picture similar to Piketty’s. Thus the FT’s assertion that their corrections of Piketty’s data show no increase in wealth concentration is an awfully bold claim, and will likely be scrutinized as much as the errors and possible methodological shortcomings that Giles found. Piketty issued a response that may strike some readers as unduly general, but it isn’t clear whether the Financial Times gave him a complete list of their errors and points of disagreement. But his response isn’t defensive (a contrast with Reinhart and Rogoff), so he at least gets points for being willing to engage in a discussion. My bet is that the Lance Taylor critique will in the end do much more to undercut Piketty’s findings than the Financial Times corrections and recalibrations, as useful as those are. Taylor challenged the widely-touted Piketty’s assertion that r > g (the rate of return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy). NC reader Ben Johannson provided a helpful summary of Taylor’s paper:
While it is critically important that errors be unearthed and examined for their seriousness, some of the FT’s “gotchas” are clear mistakes, while others appear to be disagreements about how to deal with complex and inconsistent data sets. For instance, as Neil Irwin at the New York Times notes (boldface original):
The two most serious-looking types of errors that the Financial Times found were arbitrary data adjustments and data with no source and no explanation as to why/how it was created. This may be simple failure to document adequately or in a worse-case scenario could look a lot like data-diddling. With Piketty’s book having gotten so much attention over the last few weeks, it’s a given that there will be a lot of eyes on the Giles findings and considerable debate over how much of an impact they have on Piketty’s conclusions. So hold tight and see how this shakes out. |
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