Results for “africa”
1073 found

Norman Borlaug on the Food Crisis

Here is Norman Borlaug, father of the green revolution, from about a decade ago but highly relevant today:

Yields can still be increased by 50-100% in much of the Indian sub-Continent,
Latin America, the former USSR and Eastern Europe, and by 100-200% in much of
sub-Saharan Africa, providing political stability is maintained, bureaucracies
that destroys entrepreneurial initiative are reigned in, and their researchers
and extension workers devote more energy to putting science and technology to
work at the farm level….

I now say that the world has the technology – either available or
well-advanced in the research pipeline – to feed a population of 10 billion
people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will
be permitted to use this new technology. Extremists in the environmental
movement from the rich nations seem to be doing everything they can to stop
scientific progress in its tracks. Small, but vociferous and highly effective
and well-funded, anti-science and technology groups are slowing the application
of new technology, whether it be developed from biotechnology or more
conventional methods of agricultural science. I am particularly alarmed by those
who seek to deny small-scale farmers of the Third World -and especially those in
sub-Saharan Africa – access to the improved seeds, fertilizers, and crop
protection chemicals that have allowed the affluent nations the luxury of
plentiful and inexpensive foodstuffs which, in turn, has accelerated their
economic development.

And here is an awesome graph showing how much land has been saved by improved agricultural productivity in the United States. 
Nblfig1

The globalization of barbecue?

Here is a neat but somewhat foggy blog post on barbecue:

The word out of the 2008 World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest,
the world’s largest pork BBQ contest held last weekend in Memphis, is
that the globalization of barbecue is in the "embryonic" stages.

Why is this foggy?  Well, barbecue went global some time ago, whether it be Maori "Hangi," indigenous Mexican cooking under the ground,  or North African nomads roasting a lamb.  Slow cooking at low heat is the formula in each case and usually smoke plays a role too.  The author notes that soon the Chinese will be in on it but has he ever had traditional Chinese short ribs?  By the way, the best barbecue town in America — Lockhart, Texas — draws heavily on German techniques for smoking its meats.

The pointer is from Henry Farrell.

Collier on the Food Crisis

Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion was my pick for best economics book last year (not written by a dear friend), it was smart, hard-hitting and unconventional.  Collier hasn’t lost his touch as a great comment, more like an op-ed, on the food crisis over at Martin Wolf’s Economic Forum illustrates.

The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something
that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global
supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically
sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market…. There are still many areas of the world that
have good land which could be used far more productively if it was
properly managed by large companies…

Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We
laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable
and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew
out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to
contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources
have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said
for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot
afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on
agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result,
Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty
years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited
to innovation and investment: the result has been that African
agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing
productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.

Read the whole thing.  Many more oxen are gored.

Markets in everything: reverse prostitution edition

Thousands of people in Africa will be paid to avoid unsafe sex, under a groundbreaking World Bank-backed experiment aimed at halting the spread of Aids.

The $1.8m trial – to be launched this year – will counsel 3,000 men and women aged 15-30 in southern rural Tanzania over three years, paying them on condition that periodic laboratory test results prove they have not contracted sexually transmitted infections.

The proposed payments of $45 equate to a quarter of annual income for some participants.

Here is the full story.  It is a joint private sector, public sector initiative, in case you were wondering.  I thank Johannes for the pointer.

Freer trade could fill the world’s rice bowl

Here is my latest New York Times column.  Here is the conclusion:

Lately, it’s become fashionable to assert that, in this time of financial market turmoil, the market-oriented teachings of Milton Friedman
belong more to the past than to the future. The sadder truth is that
when it comes to food production – arguably the most important of all
human activities – Mr. Friedman’s free-trade ideas still haven’t seen
the light of day.

Here is the most interesting paragraph:

The reality is that many of today’s commodity shortages, including that
for oil, occur because ever more production and trade take place in
relatively inefficient and inflexible countries. We’re accustomed to
the response times of Silicon Valley, but when it comes to commodities
production, many of the relevant institutions abroad have only one foot
in the modern age. In other words, the world’s commodities table is
very far from flat.

Here is the most tragic part of the piece:

Poor rice yields are not the major problem. The United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global rice production
increased by 1 percent last year and says that it is expected to
increase 1.8 percent this year. That’s not impressive, but it shouldn’t
cause starvation.

The more telling figure is that over the next
year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3
percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable
mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing
countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt. 

Addendum: Also from today’s NYT, read this supporting article, which covers grain in Argentina.  And from Duke, here is a related piece on Africa.

Why are gun owners so happy?

Arthur Brooks reports:

Who are all these gun owners? Are they the uneducated poor, left
behind? It turns out they have the same level of formal education as
nongun owners, on average. Furthermore, they earn 32% more per year
than nonowners. Americans with guns are neither a small nor downtrodden
group.

Nor are they "bitter." In 2006, 36% of gun owners said they were "very
happy," while 9% were "not too happy." Meanwhile, only 30% of people
without guns were very happy, and 16% were not too happy.

In 1996, gun owners spent about 15% less of their time than nonowners
feeling "outraged at something somebody had done." It’s easy enough in
certain precincts to caricature armed Americans as an angry and
miserable fringe group. But it just isn’t true. The data say that the
people in the approximately 40 million American households with guns
are generally happier than those people in households that don’t have
guns.

The gun-owning happiness gap exists on both sides of the political
aisle. Gun-owning Republicans are more likely than nonowning
Republicans to be very happy (46% to 37%). Democrats with guns are
slightly likelier than Democrats without guns to be very happy as well
(32% to 29%). Similarly, holding income constant, one still finds that
gun owners are happiest.

By the way, if you are curious, I have never even touched a gun.

Addendum: Arthur has a new (and very good) book out, Gross National Happiness.

The Horse the Wheel and Language

The tribes Europeans encountered in their colonial ventures in Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas were at first assumed to have existed for a long time.  They often claimed antiquity for themselves.  But many tribes are now believed to have been transient political communities of the historical moment.  Like the Ojibwa, some might have crystallized only after contact with European agents who wanted to deal with bounded groups to facilitate the negotiation of territorial treaties.  And the same critical attitude toward bounded tribal territories is applied to European history.  Ancient European tribal identities — Celt, Scythians, Cimbri, Teoton, and Pict — are now frequently seen as convenient names for chamelon-like political alliances that had no true ethnic identity, or as brief ethnic phenomena that were unable to persist for any length of time, or even as entirely imaginary later inventions.

That is from David W. Anthony’s The Horse The Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppe Shaped the Modern World.  In particular this book focuses on the origin of the Indo-European language group and the relationship between archeology and linguistics.  He is also skeptical of Jared Diamond’s well-known thesis that early Europe had much diffusion of innovation in the East-West direction.  Recommended.

My favorite things Utah

Lately there has been too much travel, yes, but writings these posts is fun.  I am headed toward Sundance.  Here goes:

1. Author: Orson Scott Card’s The Ender Trilogy (start with Ender’s Game) is a modern landmark which will be read for years to come.  Next on my list is Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.

2. Actor: James Woods, as he plays in Casino and Virgin Suicides, two fine movies.

3. Best Robert Redford movie: Out of Africa, schmaltz yes but I love it.

4. Film, set in: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid comes to mind.

5. Novel, set in: Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song.  The first half in particular is a knockout.

6. Can I have a category for kidnapping victim?  Jeopardy champion?

The bottom line: I love Utah.  I love its baked goods, its Mexican food, its sense of building a new world in the wilderness.  I love that it has a uniquely American religion and I find Salt Lake City to be one of America’s most impressive achievements.  I regard southern Utah as quite possibly the most beautiful part of the United States.  That said, I had a tough time filling out these categories and of course plenty of the usual categories are blank altogether.

What I’ve Been Reading

1. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein.

I liked Alan Schwartz’s Amazon review: ""Buy on apples, sell on cheese" is an old proverb among wine merchants. Taking a bite of an apple before tasting wine makes it easier to detect flaws in the wine, and the buyer who does so will not as easily make the mistake of paying more than the wine is worth. Cheese, on the other hand, pairs well with wine and enhances its flavor, so a seller who offers cheese may command a higher price for the wine (and may even deserve it, if the wine is intended to be drunk with cheese).""

2. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  Yes, that’s the Clay Shirky.  This is (implicitly) a very good Hayekian, spontaneous order treatment of social software on the web.  The book poses a simple and important question: what happens when it is virtually costless to organize people into groups?

3. Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa, by Robert Paarlberg.  The point is unassailable, the subtitle says it all.

4. Steve Coll, The Bin Ladens: A Saudi Family in the American Century.  So far it’s great.  I know you’re sick of reading about Bin Laden; just think of it as a (partial) history of the Saudis.

Addendum: The new "Nudge" blog is here.

Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain example

Let’s say a bunch of poor kids all pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball.  Wilt gets the money, the kids get to see the game.  At the end of the day Wilt is richer and the kids are poorer.  Since we wouldn’t object to any one of these transactions, why should we object to the resulting pattern?  Robert Nozick went further and argued that any "pattern-based" notion of justice would require continual and unjustified interference in personal liberties.  That was one of the most famous claims in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia; here is another summary of the argument

I’m all for the NBA but I’ve never been overwhelmed by this approach.  I agree that there is "nothing unjust" about the Chamberlain outcome but still perhaps we can do better in consequentialist terms.  Nozick’s argument defeats egalitarian leveling but does it really refute, say, mildly progressive taxation?  What if we could tax Wilt a bit and make life much better for the kids?  Without invoking public choice skepticism about government (which indeed is important), what’s so bad about that?  Is it morally wrong?  Wilt is still quite free and we get some social good in return.

I’m usually skeptical of moral arguments that don’t confront the question of "at what margin" straight up.  I will, however, buy this (abbreviated) argument:

1. A doctor is not required to devote his entire life, or even a part of it, to helping poor kids in Africa, even if he could create greater good by doing so.  Personal autonomy matters.

2. The right to keep the product of your labor — money! — is a big part of autonomy, even though it is not always recognized as such.

3. Barring end-of-the-civilized-world exigencies, no one should be forced to part with more than a certain percentage of his or her income, even when valuable public goods are at stake.  There is, after all, no end to good ideas for redistribution, not the least of which is the helicopter drop to Malawi.  We all draw the line somewhere, so it’s not enough to cite benevolence to defeat the claims of property rights and the demand for low taxes.

4. Adhering to such a percentage rule will have desirable consequentialist properties, given the public choice problems with government behavior.  Thus a kind of consilience supports this moral view.

That all said, I do not believe we have a very clear or very scientific answer as to what the right percentage is.  Furthermore "the proper percentage" is likely contingent upon historical circumstances.  I take that as representing a partial — but only partial — endorsement of Nozick’s Wilt Chamberlain argument and of course I reject the deontological ("just don’t!") nature of Nozick’s approach altogether.

Warning to extreme libertarians: Don’t even try to argue that zero is the maximum permissible rate of taxation.  Would you abolish all taxation today, immediately, if it meant a rapid collapse into social chaos?

Warning to social democrats: You are used to citing beneficience arguments to argue for raising taxes.  But you reject beneficence arguments yourself, when you refuse to step into the shoes of Peter Singer and call for even more redistribution.  I want to make you feel guilty about this tension.  What you’d like to do is dismiss Singer with a separate argument and then turn your fire to the anti-tax types and feel that beneficence is always on your side.  It isn’t. 

Here is my earlier post on Nozick’s experience machine.  Here is Will Wilkinson with more on Rawls.  Going back to our earlier discussion, Ross Douthat has provided an excellent discussion of notable conservative books.  I am a big fan of Nozick’s book although a) I don’t consider it "conservative," and b) I like the obscure sections best, such as the discussion of anarchy and government in the first part.

Johannes Fedderke and the importance of good governance

File him in the category underappreciated economists.  Does good governance matter for growth?  Could there be a more important question for economists? The standard cross-sectional growth tests do not show much of a robust effect.  But Johannes, along with co-authors Robert Klitgaard and Kamil Akramov, has a 150-page paper showing that if you take all the relevant heterogeneities into account yes, Adam Smith and Doug North were right after all.

Or do you prefer simple regressions which meet the eyeball test?

Here is the full paper.  Here is Johannes’s long paper on South African economic history.