Category: Markets

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The price of tea in Kenya

“When countries change their trade policies to protect themselves against price falls, small farmers – particularly those in developing countries – tend to lose profits,” said Will Martin, senior research fellow at IFPRI. “This platform gives governments access to the most recent information available, so they can make informed decisions on food policy that avoid creating global price instability.”

“This platform” is Ag-Incentives, and it’s just been launched by IFPRI.

Policies that affect incentives for agricultural production, such as those that raise prices on domestic markets, can artificially distort the global market, which then undermine market opportunities for small farmers in the world. Ag-Incentives allows users to compare indicators, such as nominal rates of protection, across countries and years.

At the moment, it seems that it is only “nominal rates of protection” (NRP) that are being compared, across countries and years, but that will no doubt change as the platform evolves. What are NRPs?

…the price difference, expressed as a percentage, between the farm gate price received by producers and an undistorted reference price at the farm gate level.

The “undistorted price” being “generally taken to be the border price adjusted for transportation and marketing costs.”

If I understand this correctly, if NRP is negative, the commodity is being taxed, positive and it is being subsidised. This is the picture for tea in Kenya, as an example.

I’ll run it by the mother-in-law to see if she can make some sense of it, in particular what happened in 2006 and 2014.

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Strawberry Wars forever

You know how the strawberry breeders who left the UC Davis programme a couple of years ago and set up a private company sued the university for access to the material they developed? Well, it turns out the university is now counter-suing them. I like this bit especially from the SFGate piece which brings us up to date on the Strawberry Wars:

A federal judge recently scolded both the researchers and the university for their behavior and said that each side can expect to be held financially liable at trial.

Stay tuned.

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Vegetables, joy and justice

A long(ish) Edible Manhattan piece by Rachel Nuwer on the movement to breed crops for flavour, rather than only productivity or shelf-life, very nice in its own right, also gives me the excuse to link to Jeremy’s interview on Eat This Podcast with Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network. Here’s Nuwer’s sign-off as an amuse-bouche. She first points out that production of the much un-loved kale has seen quite a jump lately in the US. Why not the Habanada pepper, the honeynut squash, or “a subtly flavored cucumber with a white rind”?

A similar renaissance could happen for these new ingredients, too — if only we demand it through our dining habits and grocery store purchases. As Swegarden points out, “Everything that happens upstream in the food system is dictated by the consumer.” Should a flavor-forward movement take hold, it has the possibility of changing the food system, including potentially creating more jobs for farmers and strengthening the shift toward local, seasonal and minimally-processed and -doused ingredients. Selman also anticipates that greater availability of delicious, affordable produce would translate into greater consumption of fruits, veggies and grains—and thus hopefully to a healthier general public. “I don’t do this because I want to hang out with high-end chefs,” she says. “It’s about joy and justice.”

Indeed it is.

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Foraging not scavenging

I have to say that I was a bit annoyed by this tweet from Bread for the World.

It’s not the promotion of gardening, of course. I’m all for gardening. It’s that word “scavenging,” with its negative connotations of rummaging through garbage. What’s so wrong about collecting edible plants from wild or semi-wild habitats? California’s native peoples used to do it, albeit as part of a very complex strategy of natural resources use and management.

Europeans viewed California Indians as having no concept of property, but they did recognize ownership based on usufruct of some resources, while setting others aside for communal purposes. Perhaps most important, as ethnobotanists such as Kat Anderson and Native Californians themselves remind us, they shaped the landscapes in which they lived through their extensive environmental knowledge, equivalent to our botany, ecology, ornithology, entomology, and more.

Chinese villagers in the Upper Yangtze still do it, and are saving the panda at the same time because of it.

“Wild harvesters are often some of the poorest people, because they don’t have access to land to farm,” says Natsya Timoshyna, the medicinal plants program leader at TRAFFIC, an anti-wildlife-trafficking organization that helped create FairWild.

Instead, these gatherers, like the villagers in China’s Upper Yangtze, are quietly responsible for maintaining the world’s supply of wild plants, a supply that provides medicine — as well as food — for up to 80 percent of the developing world.

And that’s just what has come through my feeds this week. Why not just use the term “foraging“? Am I missing something? Is support for wild-collected food seen as retrograde or imperialist or patriarchal?

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Nibbles: Aeroponic yams, Ancient crops, Kumara, Informal food vendors, Foxy, Salumi, Corn whiskey, Doomed cassava