Policy

Nibbles: Food prices, Wheat breeding, Potato Park, Mead, Peanut processing

Is the World Producing Enough Food? The NY Times has the answer(s).
Aussies trying to get to grips with salinity through breeding. Very cool, but maybe they should just stop growing wheat and think of some other crop?
Potato Park potatoes to be parked in the Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard.
You know what those naughty Vikings used to say: “Let there be mirth, mead and fornication!”
Adding value to peanuts in Bolivia. KIT video.

The IFPRI 2020 Conference on “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health,” is off and running in New Delhi, India. If you can’t be there in person, at least there’s a Twitter feed. Impressions from participants always welcome.

LATER: There’s a blog too, of course.

Looks interesting: Assessing the impact of rural policy on biodiversity: High Nature Value Farming in Italy. Next Thursday.
Gates Foundation’s Sylvia Mathews Burwell says Fortify Lives with agriculture and Nutrition. In full.
Ugandans! Grow sorghum, get a scholarship for your child. Win-win. Cheers, Nile Breweries.
Australian farmer tells all about Svalbard.
ILRI speaks about climate change, livestock and plagues — The Economist listens. Respect!

Everybody’s talking about the current food price crisis; what it means, what’s causing it; whether it is an opportunity to ask for increased funding. With impeccable timing, IFPRI has released a report examining the extent to which market prices in sub-Saharan Africa reflect changes in global prices. I haven’t read it, and here are IFPRI’s take-home messages:

Staple food prices in these countries rose 63 percent between mid-2007 and mid-2008, about three-quarters of the proportional increase in world prices.
Statistical analysis over 5 to 10 years indicates a long-term relationship with world prices in only 13 of the 62 African food prices examined. African rice prices are more closely linked to world markets than are maize prices.
The global food crisis was unusual in influencing African food prices, probably because of the size of the increase and the fact that it coincided with oil price increases. Policy responses and local factors exacerbated the effect in some cases.

IFPRI does then go on to offer some suggestions.