Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Having tried my hand at the conference-reporting lark, I have enormous respect for people like Robert Hijmans, who did us proud with his series on Harlan II, and, now, Elanor over at The Ethicurean. She (?) has been at a conference on the Politics of Food held at North Carolina State University. From what looks like a groaning table of dishes, Elanor picked on a panel on the Food Crisis, and manages to be impressed, to gush, and to be self-aware all at the same time. To whit:

It was one “a-ha” moment after another. Even the ag economist’s graphs gave me a rush. (Please don’t tell anyone that I said that, though — it’s embarrassing.)

As is customary here, I’m not going to steal Elanor’s thunder by summarizing what she has to say. Just that I found the report exciting and stimulating, and the policy shifts she mentioned made an awful lot of sense to me too. Not to mention some of the figures about investment in agriculture and growth in GDP; those are definitely going to come in handy, and soon.

Money quote:

News coverage of the food crisis has focused on the global poor as consumers whose lives are thrown out of whack by rising prices. The obvious solution, as they frame it, is to do anything necessary to make food prices low again. But in many cases, the poor are actually farmers or workers in the ag supply chain — or they used to be. If they were farmers still, they’d be making pretty good money right now. Ugarte was asking a profound question: Is the food crisis really about prices? Or is it, at its core, about policy and ownership?

Answers on a postcard, please.