This paper addresses the response to historically high rice prices in 2008 first by presenting a historical review of trends in the West African rice sector and, second, by assessing the effect of world rice prices on domestic prices, primarily at the consumer level.
Much like 2008, the world rice market seems destined for another price shock, with very aggressive buyin techniques by the Philippines fueling the run-up in prices.
This course will review the determinants of rural poverty and examine the historical pathways that have led the rural poor out of poverty. A policy perspective will be taken on all three levels of analytical interest: the macro level, the sectoral level, and the household level.
Billions of people depend on rice to survive. During the 2007–08 rice price crisis, the international community increased funding for food aid and governments tried to stabilize their domestic prices—only to further destabilize the world market. In the newest of three CGD working papers on the crisis, non-resident fellow Peter Timmer untangles the factors affecting world grain prices, from simple supply and demand to hoarding, the availability of storage, and the influence of speculation.
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The net effect of supermarkets in the developing world will be to improve the welfare of consumers, but the extent of that benefit and how well it is distributed are open questions. Many factors, including the fate of small farmers, traditional traders, and mom-and-pop shops, will come into play, and any judgment of the supermarket revolution has to consider them all. In this CGD working paper, non-resident fellow Peter Timmer draws from many perspectives to assess the effect the supermarket revolution may have on poverty alleviation.
Successful poverty reduction hinges on successful structural transformation, but poor countries must cope with political pressures resulting from deteriorating income distribution and simultaneously retain the policies that generate rapid economic growth. Based on historical and statistical evidence, CGD non-resident fellow Peter Timmer and Selvin Akkus argue for enacting policies to do just that: policies that value the many non-market payoffs of investment in agriculture, the main driver of short- and medium-term poverty reduction; context-specific policies to connect rural workers to urban economies to reduce rural poverty in the long term; and fairer rich-world agricultural trade policies to allow small farmers better access to domestic supply chains.
The loss of rice production in Myanmar is worsening the crisis in world rice markets, where prices have trebled this year. Meanwhile, Japan has 1.5 million tons of surplus rice, most of it imported from the U.S. Releasing this rice to global markets would prick a speculative bubble and bring rice prices down fast, while also encouraging China and Thailand to release their surplus stocks. But first Washington must lift its objections and Japan must decide to re-export rice that it imported from the U.S., Thailand, and Vietnam. Failure to act would mean that high-quality U.S. rice would be fed to Japanese pigs and chickens while millions of poor people suffer from hunger and malnutrition. Tom Slayton, a former editor of The Rice Trader, and Peter Timmer, CGD non-resident fellow and visiting professor at Stanford University, explain how prompt action could prevent the rice price crisis from becoming a hunger crisis.
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How do people escape poverty? In this working paper, CGD senior fellow Peter Timmer and his co-authors describe pathways out of poverty in Indonesia from 1993 to 2000, a period of economic and political turmoil. They find that most rural poor people who escaped poverty did so without moving to cities. From this experience they distill three policy recommendations: boost agricultural productivity, improve the investment climate for the rural non-agricultural sector, and make education a cornerstone of the government anti-poverty strategy. Learn more
Ever since Adam Smith, economists have debated what conditions are required for nations to become wealthy. In a new CGD brief, senior fellow Peter Timmer argues that the "Smithian conditions" – low taxes, good government, and peace – are necessary but far from sufficient. He shows how investments in education, technology, and trade have contributed to the rapid progress of countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Brunei. The "miracle" of getting rich, Timmer concludes, lies in creating durable institutions that perpetuate both sets of policies over many decades.
Are we doing well by doing good?
This CGD Note by C. Peter Timmer explores the alliance between US farmers, processors and shippers that forms the political foundation of the US food aid program. The Note outlines the current winners and losers of US food aid, and argues that surprisingly, the recipients are most often the losers.
After two decades of neglect, interest in agriculture is on the rise. This new working paper by one of the leading thinkers in rural development argues that the reach and efficiency of rural infrastructure, coupled with effective investment in agricultural research and extension, hold the key to unlocking the potential of agriculture for poverty reduction.
It has long been understood that economic growth is the essential foundation for poverty reduction. The key to income growth is the expansion of jobs that pay sustainable remunerative wages, and the two keys areas of production in this vein have almost always been agriculture and labor-intensive manufactured exports. Rising average incomes, both personal and national, are a necessary ingredient for improved livelihoods, but they do not guarantee broad-based poverty reduction. Economic history shows that countries, and communities within countries, with similar growth rates can have very different degrees of success in connecting growth to the poor and translating it into sustained poverty reduction.
Paradoxically, in most successfully developing countries, especially those in the rice-based economies of Asia, the public provision of food security quickly slips from its essential role as an economic stimulus into a political response to the pressures of rapid structural transformation, thereby becoming a drag on economic efficiency. The long-run relationship between food security and economic growth thus tends to switch from positive to negative over the course of development. Because of inevitable inertia in the design and implementation of public policy, this switch presents a serious challenge to the design of an appropriate food policy.
This paper reviews research on the impact of rice prices on the poor, on real wages in rural and urban areas, and on the broader macroeconomic consequences for investments in labor-intensive manufacturing.
"Pro-poor growth" is the new mantra of the development community. This exploratory essay, commissioned by the Indonesia Project at Australian National University (ANU), places this new interest in pro-poor growth in regional perspective and then attempts to draw historical and policy lessons for Indonesia.