C. Peter Timmer - Failed Policies Lead to Food Shortages 汉译

World food prices are pushing higher—the United Nations overall food index shows a 28.3% annual increase, with cereals up 44.1%—sparking concerns that a new food crisis may be emerging, just three years after the last one. Does this mean the world is running out of food?

The quick answer is that the world does seem to be running low on cheap food. There is still an ample potential supply of foodstuffs; it’s just not getting tapped, thereby creating low current supply even as demand shoots up with the rise of large emerging markets. This supply shortage stems from the failure of governments and donors over nearly three decades to fund the basic agricultural research, investments in rural infrastructure, and training for smallholder farmers necessary to push out the productivity frontier.

Until recently, world food crises have been relatively rare events—occurring about three times a century, usually three to four decades apart. The last one to have truly global ramifications, occurred in 1972-74. Over those two years, real rice prices rose 206.3% and real wheat prices rose 118.2%, both setting historic highs. The food crisis of 2007-08, although scary at the time, was relatively mild by comparison. Prices for wheat, rice and maize—the staple foods that provide well over half the world population’s energy intake directly and a good deal more indirectly via livestock products—rose 96.7% between 2006 and 2008, not approaching the spikes in the mid-1970s when corrected for inflation. Yet here we are just a few years later, talking about food prices again.

Sudden spikes in food prices also have a political dimension. Nothing can bring angry people into the streets faster and more spontaneously than a rapid run-up in the costs of food staples in urban markets. Leaders in Tunisia and Egypt learned this lesson the hard way. That’s why politicians in many developing countries are highly sensitive to the level and rate of change in food prices. A food-price crisis focuses the minds of political leaders on a quick, short-term resolution. But this focus comes with a real cost to longer-run investments and policy initiatives, even if this cost is hardly noticed at the time.

Policy makers who forever live in the short run, putting out the brush fires from banking crises, food riots, or the palpable fear they are about to lose their jobs, do not focus on long-run needs. Because of this tendency, agricultural research and rural infrastructure is getting neglected in most countries. The price of that neglect is there for all to see. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s public agricultural research expenditures did not expand at all in Sub-Saharan Africa, whereas they grew by 5% per year in Asia. The differential impact on agricultural productivity per worker was dramatic—increases in Africa between 1990-2002 and 2001-03 of just 7%, whereas the increase in Asia was 36%.

We can do better. In the greater scheme of things, agricultural research is not that expensive. A group of experts convened by the Asia Society and the International Rice Research Institute calculated that the productivity of rice growing on a global basis could be raised by 8.5% over baseline trends through an annual investment of $120 million between 2010 and 2030—an investment that is about 0.0002% of global GDP. Similar opportunities exist for most of the world’s important food crops. It is hard to imagine investments with higher payoffs.