Evolution of Agriculture

Stewart Brand on "Fitness Landscapes"

2012-02-05T12:10:00.000+01:00

Fitness Landscapes are Stewart Brand's favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation.

Baumwollanbau in Indien: Über 90 Prozent mit Gentechnik - Deutlich weniger Insektizide

2011-07-29T11:57:00.000+02:00

Baumwollanbau in Indien: Über 90 Prozent mit Gentechnik - Deutlich weniger Insektizide

(28.07.2011) In Indien hat sich gentechnisch veränderte Baumwolle weitgehend durchgesetzt. Nach Angaben der Regierung in Neu Dehli wird 2011 eine Fläche von 9,8 Millionen Hektar damit bewirtschaftet. Acht Jahre nach der Markteinführung entfallen fast neunzig Prozent der indischen Baumwollproduktion auf gv-Sorten. Die Landwirte können mit ihnen deutlich höhere Erträge bei geringerem Insektizideinsatz erzielen. Dadurch sind die vor allem bei Kleinbauern verbreiteten Vergiftungen zurückgegangen.

» Svalbard Seed Vault trip report - Long Views: The Long Now Blog

2011-07-25T21:47:00.000+02:00

» Svalbard Seed Vault trip report - Long Views: The Long Now Blog

The Planning:
Over the last couple years artist Steve Rowell has been planning a project to document the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as part of a larger project about the beginnings and future of agriculture. The Seed Vault is designed with a 1000 year design life to store back-up samples of every food crop seed in the world. About a year ago Rowell contacted me to see if Long Now would be interested in participating in his project. I said that we would as long as I got to come along on one of the trips to Svalbard and meet the creators of the Vault. The Norwegian government management of the vault required that Rowell also get participation from Scandinavian nations, specifically Norway as part of his project. Over the last year he was able to secure funding and collaboration with a Norwegian and a Dutch artist, and with it an official invite to visit the Vault. Long Now would cover our accommodations for this scouting trip, and I would cover my own flight. The Seed Vault administrators seem to be a bit overwhelmed with the interest in the Vault. They open the Vault about twice a year to deposit new seed stock and they are apparently inundated with requests to visit. However the remoteness of the location and their limited time on site means they really don’t have time to give many tours. But with persistence and the Scandinavian participation Steve was able to secure us the invite. We quickly booked our complicated flights, and found accommodation in one of the few places to stay in winter.

........

Women and the plough

2011-07-24T21:34:00.002+02:00

Alesina et al. have investigated in two papers the interaction between technology and culture, more specifically, the interaction between use of the plough in agriculture and the standing of women in society.

The first paper is concerned with the impact of the use of the plough on fertiliy, the other with the origin of gender roles. Here is the abstract of the paper "Fertility and the plough, NBER Working Paper 16178, Jan. 2011:

The current study finds that societies which historically engaged in plough agriculture today have lower fertility. We argue, and provide ethnographic evidence, that the finding is explained by the fact that with plough agriculture, children, like women, are relatively less useful in the field. The plough requires strength and eliminates the need for weeding, a task particularly suitable for women and children. This in turn generates a preference for fewer children, lowering fertility.

Abstract of the 2nd paper, On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough, NBER Working Paper 17098, May 2011:
This paper seeks to better understand the historical origins of current differences in norms and beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society. We test the hypothesis that traditional agricultural practices influenced the historical gender division of labor and the evolution and persistence of gender norms. We find that, consistent with existing hypotheses, the descendants of societies that traditionally practiced plough agriculture, today have lower rates of female participation in the workplace, in politics, and in entrepreneurial activities, as well as a greater prevalence of attitudes favoring gender inequality. We identify the causal impact of traditional plough use by exploiting variation in the historical geo-climatic suitability of the environment for growing crops that differentially benefited from the adoption of the plough. Our IV estimates, based on this variation, support the findings from OLS. To isolate the importance of cultural transmission as a mechanism, we examine female labor force participation of second-generation immigrants living within the US.

The Economist of July 23rd 2011 has a good review of the paper:

http://www.economist.com/node/18986073?story_id=18986073&CFID=174201398&CFTOKEN=71131223

Robert W. Fogel Investigates Human Evolution - NYTimes.com

2011-07-21T12:46:00.000+02:00

Die NYT berichtet über Robert Fogels neues Buch: “The Changing Body: Health, Nutrition, and Human Development in the Western World Since 1700,”

Robert W. Fogel Investigates Human Evolution - NYTimes.com

Scientists sequence potato genome

2011-07-17T15:31:00.000+02:00

Scientists sequence potato genome

Review of: Tushaar Shah (2009): Taming the Anarchy. Groundwater governance in South Asia.

2011-06-24T11:09:00.000+02:00

This review has appeared in: Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture 50(2):204-207.

Tushaar Shah (2009): Taming the Anarchy. Groundwater governance in South Asia. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future and Colombo: International Water Management Institute, 324 pp. ISBN 9781933115603, £49.99 (hardcover).

In the 1890s the British district collector Captain Thomas Mun travelled for years on horseback through Kolar district in semi-arid Karnataka in search for places where farmers could sink irrigation wells. He must have been quite successful and villagers still perform puja at some of the wells constructed in Mun's days. Some 110 years later Captain Mun's Indian successor in Kolar district, Sanjoy Dasgupta, continued the task of identifying promising sites for irrigation wells, but now with the help of the Indian Space Research Organisation (Luce 2006).

Much has happened to India and her agriculture since Mun. Around the year 1920 rapid population growth set in. After Independence in 1947 farmers became voters. Agriculture, which had been exploited and neglected for long, leapt forward during the Green Revolution. Rural electrification accelerated in the 1970s and the land frontier was closed at about the same time. Food production increases now had to come from increasing cropping intensity - more inputs, multiple cropping, improved seeds for crops other than wheat and rice, and much more irrigation (Lal 2005).

Agricultural change will continue on the subcontinent. The population of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan will grow from 1.56 billion people in 2010 to 2.17 billion in 2050 when the subcontinent will be home to close to 24 per cent of all the people in the world. Pressure to intensify agriculture will not relent and Bruinsma (2009) expects an expansion of irrigation in South Asia by another 8 million ha until 2050.

What was a heroic individual effort by Captain Mun has become a sea change of historical proportions. Much of of the irrigated lands in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan are now watered with groundwater from wells that are owned and operated by farmers who pay flat rates for the electricity that drives the pumps. The electricity, on which the groundwater boom relies, is provided by loss-making, government-run utilities which are firmly in the grip of politicians who depend on farmers' votes. Waning, in contrast, is the importance of surface irrigation which dominated irrigation on the subcontinent since the days of Ashoka in the 3rd century B.C.

Tushaar Shah's book "Taming the Anarchy. Groundwater governance in South Asia" informs its readers about the events and developments that set this sea change in motion, the modest but significant wealth it has brought to farmers, the risks it involves for the future state of groundwater resources, and how the change might be channeled into desirable directions. South Asia" may mean different collections of countries. Shah uses the term for the plains of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan, with the occasional inclusion of northern Sri Lanka where groundwater irrigation is rapidly growing.

The book consists of a preface, an introduction, and eight chapters followed by copious endnotes, a useful glossary of Hindi and other terms, a long list of references, and an index.

In Chapter 1 Shah provides a sketch of the historical evolution of irrigation in South Asia from Mughal India up to the current "era of atomistic irrigation." The key insights from this section are three: (i) Large-scale irrigation schemes are inflexible hierarchies, (ii) irrigated area grew the fastest after 1970 when farmers began to invest in groundwater exploitation, and (iii) when farmers decide when to irrigate and how much water to use, irrigation management changes fundamentally. Included in Chapter 1 is a section on "Irrigation Adventures Elsewhere". I ignore in my review this and similar sections in the book that are concerned with regions outside South Asia because I expect most readers to be mainly interested in what Shah has to say about irrigation in South Asia.

In Chapter 2, "Rise of the Colossus", Shah describes and explains the phenomenal rise of groundwater irrigation in South Asia. At the core of the the "Colossus" are three mundane technologies: drilling rigs, affordable diesel or electric pumps, and flexible pipes. The technology has allowed farmers to extend within 30 years gross irrigated area by more than all the irrigation development efforts by ancient rulers, moghuls, the Raj, and post Independence governments. Why did it happen? Shah suggests that it was population pressure on farmland. For methodological individualists there is another explanation: pumps, wells, and pipes liberate farmers from "the vagaries of centralized management and defunct water user associations." In short, the Colossus has risen because he was freed from the grip of government's heavy hand.

In Chapter 3 Shah traces the retreat of gravity-flow irrigation and he explains its causes. The most important insight from this section probably is the superiority, from a farmer's point of view, of individual water mamangement over collective management.

Chapters 4 and 5 are the core chapters of the book. Shah documents in Chapter 4 the many significant benefits of groundwater irrigation and Chapter 5 explores the downside of farmer-managed groundwater irrigation. The benefits of well irrigation are many and, what is particularly important in South Asia where most of the world's rural poor reside, the benefits spill over from the the small-scale "water-lords" who own a well to their poorer neighbors who don't. The spillover mechanism are markets for pumped water that have sprun up spontanously. The number of people benefiting from the groundwater sea change is impressive: some 500 million people in total Shah reckons, which is about half of the rural population of Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The costs of the spectacular growth of the groundwater irrigation economy are, in some regions, a significant loss of sustainability, as indicated by loss of water quality, falling water tables, and in some coastal areas an intrusion of salt water into aquifers. Constraining water extraction is, however, difficult because access to groundwater is unrestricted for land owners. The problem is aggravated by the policy of state electricity boards to charge flat rates for electricity delivered to farmers.

Relationships among irrigators who are connected to each other by the water in the ground are the subject of Chapter 6. Shah identifies five situations that are distinguished by the effects of water withdrawals on the quantity of water available to an individual irrigator and to a community of irrigators, and by the individual and collective effects of water conservations efforts. The five situations are compared with regard to aquifer characteristics, impact of aquifer development on groundwater users, markets for pumped water, ease of political mobilization of farmers, and scope for local aquifer governance. Moreover, for each typical situation an example is given from South Asia.

In Chapter 7 Shah turns to other countries' experiences with various instruments for governing their groundwater resources. The instruments that he discusses are direct regulations, water prices and taxes, assigning tradable property rights to water, community aquifer management, and crowding out of wells through supply augmentation. Moreover, Shah discusses integrated water resources management (IWRM), a governance package aimed at transforming informal groundwater economies into formal ones. Shah considers IWRM infeasible and not desirable under the conditions of South Asia.

In Chapter 8 Shah argues that indirect strategies for governing the groundwater economy are preferable to direct strategies, because the indirect strategies, which "operate through the environment of conduct" tend to incur lower transaction costs. Shah supports his argument with three examples where external conditions gave new directions to the groundwater economy. The Chapter closes with 12 Propositions that characterize South Asia's irrigation economy. Part of Proposition 12 warrants being cited: "The biggest barrier to effective groundwater governance in South Asia … is institutional lock-in: the region's irrigation thinking and planning are stuck. Since colonial times, irrigation policy has been dominated by 'command' and 'duty' thinking in a civil engineering mode.." and further "..mainstream irrigation policy is still steeped in the colonial mode". Finally, "The region's irrigation planners and managers need to come to terms with the new reality" (p. 242-3).

I am puzzled why Shah choose the book's mildly sensational title. There is no anarchy in the sense of an absence of government and authority in the groundwater economy. Property rights and contracts seem to be upheld with regard to pumped water that is traded in orderly local markets. Access to the resource is open to all that can afford a pump and a well. There is no evidence that irrigators who compete for the same water in an aquifer attempt to destroy their competitors water extraction equipment.

Perhaps the term "anarchy" only indicates an appreciation for the fact that goundwater is a fugitive common pool resource for which no generally applicable optimal governance system is known and where an authoritative government may be as often part of the problem as it is part of the solution. In the absence of a dominant governance scheme for groundwater exploitation there is plenty of room for experiment and for conflicting views about appropriate groundwater policy. But this is an anarchy - in the sense of chaos - in the search for groundwater solutions and not of the groundwater economy itself.

The book contains a wealth of information about the irrigation economy in South Asia and it synthesizes a large number of studies which are not (yet) accessible through popular literature date bases. But the material is not always organized in the most stringent fashion and Shah's train of thought sometimes meanders. This is, however, a minor blemish and it does not distract from the book's main contribution: to inform its readers about the sea change that is happening in South Asia's irrigation economy. I highly recomment the book to agricultural economists with in interest in groundwater governance, to irrigation engineers, and to policy makers with an interest in South Asia's agriculture.

References

Bruinsma, J. (2009). By how much do land, water and crop yields need to increase by 2050? Paper presented at the FAO Expert Meeting, 24-26 June 2009, Rome on “How to Feed the World in 2050”. Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Lal, D. (2005). The Hindu equilibirum. Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press.

Luce, E. (2006). In spite of the gods. London: Abacus.

African researchers in line for high-speed network - SciDev.Net

2011-06-20T17:16:00.000+02:00

African researchers in line for high-speed network - SciDev.Net

Reminder about your invitation from Rolf A.E. Mueller

2011-05-31T14:07:00.001+02:00

Dear EAS,

This is a reminder that on May 21, Rolf A.E. Mueller sent you an invitation to become part of his or her professional network at LinkedIn.

Follow this link to accept Rolf A.E. Mueller's invitation.

https://www.linkedin.com/e/-xj2k65-gocsyu1v-3v/doi/2956071453/6afDoXa_/gir_596407520_1/EML-inv_17_rem/

Signing up is free and takes less than a minute.

On May 21, Rolf A.E. Mueller wrote:

> To: EAS Blog [raem-cau.evolution-agrar@blogger.com]
> From: Rolf A.E. Mueller [raem@agric-econ.uni-kiel.de]
> Subject: Einladung in mein Netzwerk bei LinkedIn

> EAS,
>
> Ich möchte Sie zu meinem beruflichen Netzwerk auf LinkedIn hinzufügen.
>
> Rolf A.E.

The only way to get access to Rolf A.E. Mueller's professional network on LinkedIn is through the following link:

https://www.linkedin.com/e/-xj2k65-gocsyu1v-3v/doi/2956071453/6afDoXa_/gir_596407520_1/EML-inv_17_rem/

You can remove yourself from Rolf A.E. Mueller's network at any time.

--------------

Reminder about your invitation from Rolf A.E. Mueller

2011-05-25T10:13:00.001+02:00

Dear EAS,

This is a reminder that on May 21, Rolf A.E. Mueller sent you an invitation to become part of his or her professional network at LinkedIn.

Follow this link to accept Rolf A.E. Mueller's invitation.

https://www.linkedin.com/e/-xj2k65-go3zzbim-3o/doi/2956071453/6afDoXa_/gir_596407520_0/EML-inv_17_rem/

Signing up is free and takes less than a minute.

The only way to get access to Rolf A.E. Mueller's professional network on LinkedIn is through the following link:

https://www.linkedin.com/e/-xj2k65-go3zzbim-3o/doi/2956071453/6afDoXa_/gir_596407520_0/EML-inv_17_rem/

You can remove yourself from Rolf A.E. Mueller's network at any time.

--------------

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - Gapminder.org

2011-05-22T11:07:00.000+02:00

200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - Gapminder.org

Localizing fruit, vegetable consumption doesn't necessarily solve environmental, health issues, study suggests

2011-05-21T20:50:00.000+02:00

Localizing fruit, vegetable consumption doesn't necessarily solve environmental, health issues, study suggests

Fear of envy stifles agricultural innovation, study says - SciDev.Net

2011-05-16T14:01:00.000+02:00

Fear of envy stifles agricultural innovation, study says - SciDev.Net

Land grabs in Africa

2011-05-14T22:20:00.001+02:00

Evidence is piling up against acquisitions of farmland in poor countries

The Economist reports about the impact of land purchases by foreigners in DCs. It turns out that many are nothing but land grabs, mostly in Africa:

http://www.economist.com/node/18648855?story_id=18648855

The source of the article is a conference at IDS: Papers and presentations available at http://www.future-agricultures.org/index.php

Dragon fruit - a new exotic agricultural product

2011-05-11T09:38:00.000+02:00

Dragon fruit is a new fruit introduced to California from Vietnam, The New York Times reports. The fruit is another example for the continued evolution of agriculture.

The future of African agriculture: Can smallholders be the answer?

2011-04-24T18:55:00.000+02:00

von VoxEU.org: Recent Articles

Denis Drechsler, 23 April 2011

Smallholders are a defining feature of African agriculture. This column argues that they deserve special attention by donors and policymakers. But simply relying on the smallholder business model is unlikely to prepare African agriculture for future challenges. Instead, smallholders should be supported to engage in commercial farming or to move out of the agricultural sector.

Read on at: http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/6373

Golden Rice: IRRI Helps Rice Farmers and Consumers

2011-04-22T18:57:00.000+02:00

Golden Rice: IRRI Helps Rice Farmers and Consumers

For more than 50 years, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), has been working to improve the lives of rice farmers and consumers by delivering improved technologies to farmers, especially new varieties of rice. Golden Rice is an incredible innovation that we are proud to now be working on. It has a huge potential to help reduce the devastating consequences of vitamin A deficiency in rice-growing and -consuming countries.

More on the Blog of the B&M Gates Foundation which supports IRRI's work on Golden Rice.

Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity Read more: Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity

2011-04-22T10:19:00.000+02:00

Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity, writes the San Francisco Business Times.

Now we know how we can make a major contribution towards saving the EARTH from heat collapse: Provide a subsidy to people who grow their personal marijuana crop in the sun and not in the living room! But then I'm not so sure: When people visit their marijuana plots with their gas-guzzling SUVs ... RAEM

1% of U.S. electricity | San Francisco Business Times

Marijuana causes global warming, uses 1% of U.S. electricity

Published: April 12, 2011

People growing marijuana indoors use 1 percent of the U.S. electricity supply, and they create 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year (not counting the smoke exhaled) according to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Gary Becker on food prices and the poor

2011-04-18T10:51:00.000+02:00

Gary Becker blogs about food prices and the poor:

"How to (and not to) Help Poor Families in Developing Countries Cope with Rising Food Prices-Becker"

Government failure & the environment

2011-04-03T13:58:00.000+02:00

Paul Seabright has two nice examples of how a government may fail to conserve natural resources (even though it is immune to market

failure):

"Cotton growers in Uzbekistan benefited from 'free' water, which they used in such abundance that the Aral Sea, fed from rivers that were dammed for irrigation, shrank to half its surface area and a third of its volume in less than thirty yeary. It left behind a great bowl of salt encrusted, chemically polluted, infertile land, and from this bowl the steppe winds blow poison duts into the lungs of over two million inhabitants, who now suffer from one of the highest incidents of respiratory disease in the world." (p. 44-45)

And:

"Uzbekistan's cotton growers also enjoyed 'free' energy: as late as

1995 families were reported to be keeping their gas cookers running twenty-four hours a days (sic) because of a shortage of matches." (p.

45-46)

Source: Seabright, P. (2004). The company of strangers. Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.

IT im Agribusiness: IT Potentiale in der Agrar- und Ernährungswirtscha...

2011-03-28T13:54:00.000+02:00

IT im Agribusiness: IT Potentiale in der Agrar- und Ernährungswirtscha...: "Am 15.12.2009 startete eine Umfrage zum Thema ' IT Potentiale in der Agrar- und Ernährungswirtschaft'.

Boomtown 2025: A Special Report

2011-03-25T14:11:00.000+01:00

Agriculture will have to adapt to the fact that most people already live in cities. The magnitude of the change is illustrated in a Special Report in "Foreign Policy" with the title "Boomtown 2025". The report is a usefull collection of numbers and data graphs.

Envy Holds Back Agricultural Development, Study Suggests

2011-03-23T13:29:00.000+01:00

ScienceDaily (Mar. 22, 2011) — Agricultural innovation in developing countries can be hampered and discouraged by envy, according to research published March 22 by academics at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

Researchers found that envy reduced adoption of innovations such as fertilizers and improved seeds, and modernisation can be discouraged out of fear of a negative reaction from others, sometimes manifesting itself in the form of the 'evil eye' -- the belief that a look can cause injury or bad luck for the person at whom it is directed -- and similar attitudes.
The study focused on four rural villages in Ethiopia, the aim being to understand the impact of envy or related motivations on economic development, in particular investment in agricultural innovations. The findings have implications for rural development, with envy being a "formidable obstacle" to it and having a destructive impact.
The paper, entitled "Envy and Agricultural Innovation: An Experimental Case Study from Ethiopia," is published by the Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Science (CBESS) at UEA. It is believed to be the first study that attempts to capture the negative effect of envy in a real-life setting such as agriculture and in a developing country context.
....

Creating Abundance

2011-03-16T23:07:00.006+01:00

I recently reviewed Olmstead & Rhode "Creating Abundance" for the Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture 50 (2011), No. 1. It is a great book. Here is my review:

OLMSTEAD, ALAN L. and PAUL W. RHODE (2008):
Creating Abundance. Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development.
Cambridge, Cambs, UK: Cambridge University Press, 480 pp. ISBN 978 0 52185 711 6, £44.00 (hardback).

It took mankind several million years until it reached its first billion people on earth at around the year 1800. The explanation of the slow growth of human population was provided by Malthus: population growth is shackled to food production, and food production grows only linearly and slowly. The two-billion mark was crossed only 125 years later, sometime between 1925 and 1930, and by 1960 there were three billion people on earth. This was not what Malthus had thought possible.

Population growth in the United States of America was even more spectacular. After a steep drop in the number of indigenous people that was caused by Old World diseases, population in the United States had recovered to about 5.2 million in 1800 and then grew rapidly to 132.2 million by 1930. This is equivalent to an annual compound growth rate of 2.5 percent. But there was no trace of the misery that, as Malthus had predicted, should accompany rapid population growth. To the contrary: the poor and starving arrived by the million from Europe and the better-off who stayed behind were fed with wheat and beef from the Great Plains and with fruit products from Florida and California, they clothed in cotton from the south, and they enjoyed their smoke of Virginia tobacco. North American farmers, helped by businessmen, scientists, and government administrators, had put to rest the Malthusian curse: Food production had outpaced population growth.

How did American farmers achieve this feat? Sure, there was plenty of land for the taking. But which crops were suitable for the harsh climate of the northern states, which for the warm, humid South, and which crop fitted into which of the many agroclimatic niches in California? In their book “Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development” Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode highlight the role of biological innovations in the miraculous growth of agriculture and food production in the U.S. in the period from the first half of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, when a globalized world jumped the Malthusian trap. It is an excellent book which I recommend without any qualification to any scholar who has only the faintest interest in agricultural innovation and development.

The chapters and their contents

The book is organized into thirteen chapters. In the Introduction Olmstead and Rhode spend much space on discussing earlier economic theories of agricultural innovation which put mechanical innovation on center stage. More importantly, they also point out that agricultural innovation is different from innovation in other sectors: “... human intervention into biological processes predictably produces natural reactions in the form of insects and pathogens that inevitably erode the productivity of past innovations” (p. 13). Biological innovations therefore require maintenance research. Moreover, Olmstead and Rhode acknowledge what seems obvious but is often given short shrift in the agricultural innovation literature: farm animals, including draft animals, were also subject to substantial biological innovation.

Seven chapters of the book are concerned with crops: one chapter each for wheat, corn and tobacco, three on cotton, and one chapter on feed crops, including soybeans. Three chapters focus on farm animal innovations and innovations in the products and services derived from farm animals: meat, wool, draft power, and, perhaps most importantly, milk which was converted from a veritable natural health hazard into a healthy industrial product. Chapter 8 is different from the others because of its geographic focus on California.

The book closes with chapter 13, “Tying It Together”, where Olmstead and Rhode collect their key insights. A sentence, which I consider to be the bottom line of the book warrants citing: “American farmers and their allies in universities, government, and industry were keenly interested in biological innovation, invested heavily in learning and applying biological technologies, and reaped considerable returns from these investments. Given the rapidly changing pest environment, to have done otherwise would have been disastrous” (p. 387).

Lessons for tomorrow’s agriculture

A theme connecting all the chapters of the book is the authors' attempt to refute the induced innovation hypothesis which Hayami and Ruttan proposed four decades ago. The authors' refutation succeeds. But being relieved of this hypothesis is insufficient reward for reading some 400 pages of text. I think the value of the book lies elsewhere. The book's real value lies in the contributions that it makes to our ability to shape tomorrow's agriculture when more than nine billion, a fair share of them relatively rich people, need to be fed without increasing by much the area of cropped land, and when agriculture also has to meet increasingly high demands for sustainability, in addition to the demands for tangible products.

One contribution of the book is the insight that oil-powered tractors are a land-saving technology because land used for feed production is saved when draft animals are replaced by tractors. The insight suggests that growing crops to power tractors and other vehicles is, from the perspective of land use, a regression into the animalpowered age.

Second, we will need the interplay of all agents in the innovation process – farmers, agribusiness, researchers, scientists, and government agencies as well. Moreover, the interplay itself needs innovation which may have to be initiated by government, as the USDA-initiated one-seed movement in the cotton industry has shown.

Third, agricultural information – whether it is encapsulated in words or in genes – must be allowed to flow freely. Without the liberal influx of crop varieties and collections, of breeding animals, of immigrants with a background in agriculture, and of scientific learning from the laboratories in Europe, progress of American agriculture would have been much diminished. By preventing access to genetic information, strong intellectual property rights to seed may reduce the ability to conduct crop improvement activities by more than they increase the incentive to engage in such activities.

Fourth, farmers and agribusiness entrepreneurs must be able and be allowed to run risks. Agoston Haraszthy, for example, failed to grow grapes commercially at four locations before he succeeded in California's Sonoma valley. Large numbers of nonnative crop species were imported, particularly to California, without much concern for precautionary principles.

Fifth, American agricultural development provides ample evidence of the high adaptability of crops and farm animals to diverse geographic locations and agro-climates. With the exception of corn all major crops now grown in the United States were introduced after 1491 and many much later. And once introduced, the crops migrated within the country, sometimes over long distances. Alfalfa, initially introduced from Chile and long considered unsuitable for the harsh cold climates of the northern states, eventually conquered these states too. The western frontier of wheat growing moved west over a distance of more than 2,000 km in the relatively short period from 1840 to 1910 and its northern frontier moved north by more than 500 km. The temperature range in which corn was grown, was extended from 6.9°C in 1840 to 8°C in 1910; the temperature range for wheat grew from 6.1°C in 1840 to 9.2°C in 1910. The numbers give hope that agriculture will be able to adapt to future climate change.

Sixth, when new scientific phenomena have been discovered, government action may be needed to quickly translate new knowledge into effective action. This happened after the germ theory had been established and when pathogens in milk had been identified as major killers, particularly of children. Without the government enforced tuberculosis eradication program and without mandatory pasteurization of milk more people would have been killed by “nature’s perfect food”.

Finally, we need not go back to Malthus for guidance, as die-hard neo-Malthusians suggest that we do, on how to cope with the coming increase of world population by three billion people. Malthus' theory is no longer valid. Biological innovation has liberated agriculture from its inability to increase by more than in arithmetical ratio.

Rich lore of invention and innovation stories

We do not yet have a coherent economic theory of agricultural invention and innovation. Absent a coherent theory, we live by disjunct examples and stories. Olmstead and Rhode enrich our agricultural R&D-storybook.

There is a story of serendipity, when Stephen Slade, a slave of Caswell County, NC, inadvertently invented the use of charcoal for curing tobacco, which subsequently fetched a much higher price. There are many examples of crop collectors who heeded Thomas Jefferson's dictum, “The greatest service which can be rendered to any country is to add a useful plant to its culture”. There are stories of innovations that backfired, such as the introduction of Thompson grass which turned into a formidable weed. There is a story of the limits of ingenuity and science which so far have failed to provide a cure for Pierce’s disease which forces grape growers to abandon infected vineyards. Finally, there is the story of the Göttingen-trained, University of Wisconsin biochemist Stephen Babcock whose invention of a new method for measuring milk fat content was said to keep more farmers honest than the Bible ever did.

There is much more in the book. Read for yourself. You will not regret your time spent with Olmstead and Rhode.

The proletarianization that didn't happen

2011-03-06T13:09:00.001+01:00

I am currently working on a review for the Quarterly Journal of International Agriculture of Tushaar Shah's (2009) book, "Taming the Anarchy. Groundwater governance in South Asia". In order to undust my knowledge about the conditions of agriculture in India I am reading sections of Deepak Lal's (2005) "The Hindu Equilibrium" in parallel. Lal characterizes his book as "a work of exorcism" (p.4), of the "hedgehog" ideas of Malthus, Marx and Lewis, whose "... continuing hold is an important element in the continuing misdiagnoses of the causes and cures of India's chronic poverty." (p. 3)

A particularly impressive example of Lal's exorcism is the story of proletarianization of Indian small-farmers on pp. 188-189 in Lal (2005):
"Finally, it has been argued, following the work of S.J. Patel, that the process of commercialization of agriculture under the British led to the creation of a new class of landless agricultural labourer. For the pre-1870 period, Patel had based his claim on various comments by either nineteenth century observers of other writers. In particular he cited R.P. Dutt's statement that 'in 1842, Sir Thomas Munro as Census Commissioner reported that there were no landless peasants in India (an undoubtedly incorrect picture, but indicating that the numbers were not considered to require statistical measurement).' Dharma Kumar (1965), apart fom a detailed statistical critique of this view, devastatingly retords: 'It does not strengthen one's confidence in this view to recall that there was no all-India census until 1871, that there was no Madras census in 1842, that Sir Thomas Munro was never Census Commissioner, and that in 1842 he was dead.'"

Origins of farming in Europe result of human migration and cultural change, study suggests

2011-02-27T21:12:00.000+01:00

ScienceDaily (2011-02-22) -- It has long been debated as to whether the transition from a largely hunter-gatherer to an agricultural subsistence strategy in Europe was the result of the migration of farmers from the Near East and Anatolia, or whether this transition was primarily cultural in nature. A new study suggests that the prehistoric adoption of farming practices in outlying regions of Europe, Scandinavia, the Baltic, European Russia and the Ukraine, was the result of cultural diffusion. The new study uses measurements of skulls of hunter-gathering (Mesolithic) and early farming (Neolithic) prehistoric populations from Europe, Near East and Anatolia to find answers.

Economist: Special report on feeding the world

2011-02-27T18:12:00.000+01:00

The Economist of Feb 26th 2011 has a Special Report on feeding the world: "The 9 billion-people question".

Sections of the report are:

How much is enough
Plagued by politics
No easy fix
Wast not, want not
Doing more with less
Our dail bread
Not jsut calories
A prospect of plenty.

The report can be downloaded as a pdf-file without charge.
RAEM

New findings in India's Bt cotton controversy: Good for the field, bad for the farm?

2011-02-20T17:11:00.000+01:00

ScienceDaily (2011-02-07) -- Crop yields from India's first genetically modified crop may have been overemphasized, as modest rises in crop yields may come at the expense of sustainable farm management, says a new study.

A story about Theodore Schultz and human capital

2011-01-25T22:05:00.002+01:00

One of my favorite stories about human capital has been told by Theordore Schultz. Tonight I found again Deirdre McCloskey's version of the story:

"Shortly after the Second World War the agricultural economist Theodore Schultz, later to win the Nobel prize for the work, spent a term based at Auburn University in Alabama, interviewing farmers in the neighborhood (Schultz 1988). One day he interviewed an old and poor farm couple and was struck by how contented they seemed. Why are you so contented, he asked, though very poor? They answered: You're wrong, Professor. We're not poor. We've used up our farm to educate four children through college, remaking fertile land and well-stocked pens into knowledge of law and Latin. We're rich.
The parents had told Schultz that the physical capital, which economists think they understand, is in some sense just like the human capital of education. The children now owned it, and the parents did, too. Once it had been rail fences and hog pens and mules. Now it was in the children's brains, this human capital. The farmer couple was rich."
....
"A hog pen, Schultz would say to another economist, is 'just like' Latin 101. The other economist would have to admit that there is something to it. Both the hog pen and the Latin instructions are paid for by saving. Both are valuable assets for earning income, understanding 'income' to mean, as economists put it, 'a stream of satisfaction'. Year after year the hog pen and the Latin cause satisfaction to stream out like water from a dam. Both last a long time but finally wear out when the pen falls down and the Latin-learned brain dies. And the one piece of capital can be made into the other."

Source: McCloskey, D. 1999. If you're so smart. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. p. 13

The Schultz (1988) reference is: Schultz, T. 1988. Are university scholars and scientists free agents? Southern Humanities Review 22(Summer):251-60.

I could not find this refence on the Web. But I found a paper by Schultz with an identical titel: Schultz, T. 1988. Are university scholars and scientists free agents? Minerva 25(3):349-257. I hope that a paper by the same author with the same title has the same content.

RAEM

NYTimes.com: U.S. Farmers Have Adapted Before to Sharp Shifts in Temperature

2011-01-10T22:19:00.001+01:00

This page was sent to you by: raem@agric-econ.uni-kiel.de

Message from sender:
Ag history has something to teach for the days if and when ag has to adapt to climate change. RAEM

BUSINESS DAY | January 06, 2011
U.S. Farmers Have Adapted Before to Sharp Shifts in Temperature
By PAUL VOOSEN of Greenwire
Thanks to global warming, North American wheat production is set to move back in time. Temperatures in the nation's bread bas...



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2010-08-25T20:49:00.000+02:00

Friends of world food & ag,

The Royal Society has published a "Theme issue 'Food security: feeding the world in 2050' compiled and edited by H. Charles J. Godfray, John R. Beddington, Ian R. Crute, Lawrence Haddad, David Lawrence, James F. Muir, Jules Pretty, Sherman Robinson and Camilla Toulmin".

You find the paper in the Philosphical Transactions of the Royal Society B: http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/365/1554.toc

[I hate the expression ""feeding the world": The baker and the butcher don't feed us; they produce sausages and bread for sale. Farmers don't produce wheat to "feed us"; they produce wheat for sale to millers. Even Royal Philosophers should get the difference - which is known at latest since 1776!]

Cheers, RAEM
--------------------------------------------
Dr. R.A.E. Mueller, Prof.
Dept. of Agricultural Economics
University at Kiel
D-24118 Kiel, Germany
O: +49-(0)431-880 4418
M: +49-(0)174-744 0837
raem@agric-econ.uni-kiel.de
http://www.agric-econ.uni-kiel.de/Abteilungen/II/

One Tablet per Child

2010-06-11T21:04:00.000+02:00

RAEM (raem@agric-econ.uni-kiel.de*) has sent you an article from TechnologyReview.com!

Die Kids in den Entwicklungsländern sind bald besser mit IT ausgestattet als die Studies an unseren Unis.

Click below to read the article:

One Tablet per Child
OLPC may drop "$100 laptop" in an attempt to develop an innovative $75 tablet computer.
By David Talbot

If clicking on the title above does not work, paste the link below into your web browser:
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25482/

*The sender's identity has not been verified. Click here to read Technology Review's Privacy Policy.

RAEM sent you this article from OECD Observer.

2010-05-03T11:41:00.001+02:00

Please do not reply to this message. All replies will be sent to observer@oecd.org.

Food security
http://www.oecdobserver.org/news/fullstory.php/aid/3212

Can global agriculture and food systems provide for the predicted 9 billion people living in the world in 2050? Predictions of global famine are not new, but recent setbacks in the fight to eradicate hunger have brought agriculture back to centre stage in international discussions.

In September 2000, world leaders adopted the UN's Millennium Goals. Goal 1's targets include halving the share of the global population suffering from hunger in 2015 compared with 1990. Progress was steady until around 2007, with the proportion of children under five who are undernourished (the UN's broad indicator of hunger in the total population) declining from 33% in 1990 to 26% in 2006. Even so, it was obvious that the goal was not going to be easy to reach, and that was before the rise in food prices in 2008, and before the recession wiped out many of the gains. According to the FAO, the proportion of hungry people in developing countries rose to 19% in 2009, compared with 16% in 2004-06, and 18% in 1995-97.

Food insecurity is both an immediate tragedy and threat to longer-term wellbeing. Faced with hunger, families first tend to reduce consumption of higher quality foods, such as meat or vegetables. But as the crisis continues, they may have to sell the means by which they normally earn a living–animals or tools for instance–or take out loans that will leave them impoverished and indebted for years to come. Education and healthcare may become luxuries they can't afford.

There are fears that hunger will never be eradicated and that, on the contrary, the situation will continue to get worse for many people, with demand for food commodities accelerating while the increase in per capita food supply slows. It's true that several factors are combining to boost demand. For a start, there's the mechanical effect of population growth. Output will have to double over the next 40 years to feed a world population of 9 billion in 2050.

Added to that, although there will be crises and recessions in the future, the trend is for the world to get richer and for more people to adopt Western-style diets rich in meat, dairy and other foodstuffs that demand higher inputs than diets based on cereals or tubers. Biofuels also play a role here. Finally, environmental pressures on agriculture are growing, with climate change introducing a number of uncertainties.

Two assumptions underlie the pessimistic outlook: hunger is due to a lack of food supply, and it will not be possible to increase this supply fast enough to keep up with growth in demand. Such worries are not new. Ever since Malthus published his famous essays on demography at the end of the 18th and start of the 19th centuries, there have been predictions that the world will face mass starvation. As Malthus himself put it in An essay on the principle of population: "The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race."

Malthus was criticised for underestimating the potential for improvement through scientific and technological innovation, but his legacy persisted. Over a hundred years later, the Club of Rome sounded the alarm in The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. This too was criticised, not least by the OECD's Interfutures Project, launched in 1976. Interfutures argued that the physical limits to food production are not a given, and that it was possible to offset the negative impacts of environmental or other trends.

In reality, the world has never produced so much food, and the EU and the US even had to implement policies to reduce various food "mountains" and "lakes"–butter, beef, milk, wine and so on. The rate of progress in agricultural productivity over the past few decades has been phenomenal, even for long-established crops. Take wheat for instance. It took a thousand years to increase yields in England from around half a tonne a hectare to 2 tonnes. To increase from 2 tonnes to 6 tonnes took forty years. The global area under crops expanded by about 12% between 1960 and 2000, but cereal production increased by over 100%, oil crop production by over 300% and fruit and vegetables by over 200%. Meat production shows a similar pattern. Permanent pastureland increased by 10% over this forty-year period, but bovine meat production grew by 90% and that of pigmeat by 240%. The increase in poultry production was even more spectacular, at over 650% in the same period.

If people are hungry today, it is because they cannot afford to buy food, not because there is not enough available. Obesity is now a problem even in some developing countries, and much of the food produced (half, according to Oxfam) is either thrown away uneaten or spoiled because of poor storage and transport conditions. The immediate answer to hunger is to reinforce the capacity of the World Food Programme and other emergency response initiatives, but a more lasting solution requires placing food security in the wider context of economic development.

Historical evidence–and common sense–suggest that as a society becomes richer, food security becomes less of a problem. Developing countries with very different levels of economic development, population size and geographical location have succeeded in reducing poverty and improving nutrition. Despite the significant differences among them, they share some characteristics. During the period when they had the greatest success in reducing poverty, the macroeconomic context became progressively more favourable. Their own governments were lowering export taxes, reducing overvalued exchange rates and dismantling inefficient state interventions in agricultural markets. Meanwhile, the governments of rich country trading partners were reducing the kinds of support to their farmers that distorted production and trade the most.

In other words, the agriculture sector is important, but on its own is unlikely to be able to eradicate hunger. The objective should be to ensure that people–and countries–can buy enough to eat, not necessarily that they become self-sufficient. Some developing countries will not have the physical conditions needed to produce enough food, but that's the case for developed countries too. Japan, for instance, is a major food importer, but it can easily afford this thanks to its exports.

When the non-agricultural sector expands, the food and agriculture sector benefits too because the purchasing power of local consumers increases, and the country can take advantage of international markets both to buy food more cheaply than it could produce it and to sell its own products, whether agricultural or not. Trade liberalisation and improved global transport networks have already made food imports more readily available everywhere, including for the least developed countries. In 2003, grain imports accounted for 17% of their consumption, compared with 8% in 1970, and 55% of their vegetable oils were imported, compared with 9%.

Developed countries have a role to play, and not just through example. For a start, they could remove the trade barriers that prevent developing countries from competing with rich country producers and, through initiatives like Aid for Trade, provide help to develop the capacities needed to take advantage of opportunities in both domestic markets and abroad. The OECD itself can contribute through its expertise and experience in data collection, analysis, policy advice and programme monitoring.

The OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is the exclusive source of information on its member countries' aid and monitors aid flows to agriculture and food security. The OECD also leads the consortium of organisations created to track the Aquila Food Security Initiative pledges that were made at the 2009 meeting of the G-8 in L'Aquila, Italy. There, world leaders committed $20 billion over three years for sustainable agriculture development and safety nets for vulnerable populations. Such commitments, however important and well-meaning, will not help to put food on the table if they are not followed by action to bring about improvements across a broad range of areas linked to agriculture, particularly trade, but also education and training, infrastructures, and management and marketing skills. Get the policies right on these, and food security will surely follow.

References

Cervantes-Godoy, D. and J. Dewbre (2010), "Economic Importance of Agriculture for Poverty Reduction", OECD Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Working Papers, No. 23, OECD, Paris.

OECD (2009), OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2009 to 2018, Paris. Available at
www.agri-outlook.org/

US Department of Agriculture (2009), Food Security Assessment, 2008-09, Washington DC. Available at www.ers.usda.gov/

SciDev.Net: Poor want biomass, not biodiversity, finds study

2010-05-02T22:41:00.000+02:00

RAEM saw this News on the SciDev.Net website and thought you'd like to see it.

========================================
Message from RAEM:

========================================

Poor want biomass, not biodiversity, finds study
http://www.scidev.net/en/news/poor-want-biomass-not-biodiversity-finds-study.htmlSian Lewis and Naomi Antony

30 April 2010

<p>The quest to preserve biodiversity means little to the poor, who instead want to increase biomass, a study has unexpectedly found.</p>

----------------------------------------
SciDev.Net is not responsible for the content of this email, which does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of SciDev.Net. Please note that the sender's details have not been verified.

Population, agriculture and food security

2010-04-30T20:31:00.000+02:00

ForeignPolicy.com has several articles concerned with population, agriculture and the future of food security.

In "Bomb Scare" Charles Kenny argues that "The world has a lot of problems. An exploding population isn't one of them."

Robert Paarlberg advises whole food shoppers: "Stop obsessing about arugula. Your "sustainable" mantra - organic, local, and slow - is no recipe fo saving the world's hungry millions."

Anna Lappe objects. In "Don't panic, go organic" she tells her readers, "Bo not troubled by Robert Paarlberg's scaremongering. Organic practices can feed the world - better, in fact, than wasteful industral farming."

RAEM

Wie naive Wohltäter die Missetäter unterstützen

2010-03-06T20:19:00.003+01:00

SpiegelOnline berichtet

BBC-Enthüllung: Äthiopiens Rebellen klauten Live-Aid-Millionen

Es war die weltgrößte öffentliche Hilfsaktion: Beim Pop-Projekt Band Aid und dem folgenden Benefizkonzert Live Aid kamen 1985 Hunderte Millionen Dollar für die Hungernden Äthiopiens zusammen. Wie die BBC jetzt berichtet, zweigten Rebellen einen Großteil des Geldes ab - und kauften Waffen davon. (...)

Mehr bei .. hhttp://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,681906,00.html

Ag Productivity Strategies for the Future

2010-02-13T20:37:00.001+01:00

Agricultural Productivity Strategies for the Future: Addressing U.S. and Global Challenges
This timely Issue Paper includes a preface from Dr. Norman E. Borlaug and has been prepared as an update of CAST Paper No. 1, written by Dr. Borlaug in 1973. The authors of the current paper address (1) future demands facing agriculture; (2) the relationship of bioenergy and bioproducts to agriculture; (3) major issues impacting future U.S. agricultural productivity; (4) major issues facing agricultural productivity in other parts of the world; (5) strategies to meet future food needs; and (6) examples of research areas that could enable the next "Green Revolution." The authors question the commitment by the United States and many other countries for support of agricultural research and indicate the far-reaching impact that such research, education, and resulting technology--or lack thereof--will have on the nation and the world. Chair: Gale Buchanan, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, The University of Georgia, Tifton Campus. IP45, January 2010, 16 pp. FREE. Available online and in print (fee for shipping/handling).
See: http://www.cast-science.org/displayProductDetails.asp?idProduct=168

Outlook World Food

2009-09-22T17:17:00.001+02:00

Deutsche Bank Research has released on Sept 21st 2009 a study on the outlook for world food: "The global food equation: Food security in an environment of increasing scarcity."

RAEM

Demise of Norman Borlaug

2009-09-18T16:02:00.003+02:00

Norman Borlaug, an American plant breeder credited with saving millions from starvation in the 1960s and 1970s, died September 12 at the age of 95. reports VOANews

The Economist has an obituary on Borlaug.

RAEM

The myth of water wars

2009-03-28T17:01:00.002+01:00

Occasionally, one comes across a paper or book that fundamentally changes one opinion on an issue. Such publications usually reveal some errors or misperceptions of which one was unaware and the publication leaves one with the feeling of having been enlightended by it.

In the 1970s Julian Simon's "Ultimate Resource" fundamentally changed my mind about much of what is being written on resource scarcity. In particular, ever since Simon I no longer consider as trustworthy any publication from the UN and its affiliates which deals with resource scarcities and population.

This week's "Nature" contains such an enlightening piece: Wendy Barnaby's "Do nations go to war over water". Barnaby begins her essay with the United Nations warning that "climate change harbours the potential for serious conflicts over water" and she argues convincingly that such conflicts, wars over water in particular, are unlikely to happen. The peaceful antidote against conflicts over scarcity is trade: countries short of water tend to import "virtual" water rather than resort to violently grabbing water from neighbors that are better endowed with this resource.

GM-Cassava

2009-02-23T17:55:00.002+01:00

Beta-carotene-rich GM-cassava is entering field trials in Nigeria. If all goes well, this could be an important step in the techno-physio evolution of mankind.

India's agro-wikipedia

2009-01-26T19:34:00.003+01:00

India, with the help of the World Bank, launched "agropedia" an agricultural wikipedia intended "to disseminate crop- and region-specific information to farmers and agricultural extension workers — who communicate agricultural information and research findings to farmers — and provide information for students and researchers" SciDevNet reports on January 21st 2009.

Good idea. It may be interesting to watch whether and how the thing develops.

RAEM

Rumblings after the crisis

2008-12-21T21:26:00.001+01:00

Has the food crisis abated?

The Scientific American recently published an edited transcript from an interview with Joachim von Braun, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In the question-an-answer segment, von Braun discusses current issues and future projections surrounding world food prices and their relationship to the global economic downturn. Although world grain prices have dropped in recent months, von Braun warns that food security in developing contries continues to be in great risk and that increased investment in agricultural research and development is needed in order to boost productivity, lower market volatility and expand social protection and child nutrition.

Food price bubble

2008-08-10T11:36:00.002+02:00

Stefan Tangermann, OECD Director for Trade and Agriculture and formerly professor at the Dept. of Ag. Econ. at Goettingen, discusses at Vox the causes of the food price bubble:

Tangermann's opening statement in his blog:
"New research shows that India, China, and speculators are not the culprits in the food price explosion. Biofuels were a significant element in the 2005-2007 food price surge as they accounted for 60% of the growth in global consumption of cereals and vegetable oils. There cannot be any doubt that biofuels were a significant element in the rise of food prices. Since new research also shows that biofuel support policies are disappointingly ineffective on environmental grounds, governments should reconsider them."

RAEM

Martin Wolf discusses Jeffrey Sachs' new book

2008-06-15T01:13:00.005+02:00

Martin Wolf discusses in his FT column Jeffrey Sachs' new book. He begins his article with:

"Is it possible for the vast mass of humanity to enjoy the living standards of today’s high-income countries? This is, arguably, the biggest question confronting humanity in the 21st century. It is today’s version of the doubts expressed by Thomas Malthus, two centuries ago, about the possibility of enduring rises in living standards. ... "

RAEM

A glimpse of CO2-poor life

2008-06-15T00:48:00.002+02:00

Don Boudreaux of GMU & Cafe Hayek has dug out a nice description of life at a time when people left only a small CO2-footprint. RAEM

Rice super-gene?

2008-05-10T15:45:00.001+02:00

Is this the rice super-gene? from PhysOrg.com

Researchers in China have pinpointed an elusive gene that plays a linchpin role in determining the harvest potential of rice, according to a study released on Sunday by the journal Nature Genetics.

[...]

Fuel, emissions, and long-distance shipping of food

2008-05-04T11:42:00.003+02:00

Elisabeth Rosenthal has written in the International Herald Tribune an informative article on the unaccounted environmental costs of shipping food over long distances. The EU wants to change that and remove the fuel-tax privileges for international freight. However, the ecological cost and benefits of long-distance shipping are usually not made and Rosenthal observes:
"The problem is measuring those emissions. The fact that food travels farther does not necessarily mean more energy is used. Some studies have shown that shipping fresh apples, onions and lamb from New Zealand might produce lower emissions than producing the goods in Europe, where for example, storing apples for months would require refrigeration."
RAEM

Martin Wolf and Paul Collier on the Food Price Spike

2008-05-04T11:09:00.002+02:00

Martin Wolf of the FT has commented on the current food price spike. Wolf calls for a change in ag policies: away from protection of national markets and more global market integration.

Paul Collier, econ prof at Oxford and formerly director at the World Bank, puts in his comment on Wolf's blog some of the blame for the spike a the feet of farm romanticism and ecological romaticism in the West: too much protection for small farms and silly support for bio-fuel.

RAEM

How Indian agriculture suffers from government-distorted markets

2008-05-03T16:24:00.003+02:00

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar identifies in a contribution to the Cato Institute web site a list of market distortions and government failures that hold back the evolution of Indian agriculture. Among them are:
- reduced spending on agricultural research and increased spending on farm subsidies;
- insufficient canal maintenance because of reduced prices of canal water;
- politically determined low prices for electricity encourage the use of groundwater even where water tables are falling;
- maintenance-intensive dirt rural roads instead of sealed roads;
- high subsidy for nitrogen fertilizer encourages unbalanced fertlizer application which applies too little P and K;
- marketing law prevent food processors and retailers to purchase directly from farmers.
RAEM

Trade and ag price increases

2008-04-30T21:45:00.002+02:00

Tyler Cowen, econ prof at Georgr Mason University, USA, blames in his blog trade restrictions for some of the recent increases in ag prices, rice prices in particular.

RAEM

Should we believe the EU Parliament?

2008-04-27T20:40:00.004+02:00

The EU Parliament reckons that the "'Era of cheap food is over,' says EU". I don't know whether Parliaments are the best predictors of agricultural market prices. My bet is, they aren't. Let's wait and see how long it will take until the EU and the EU Parliament take the current ag price bubble as a pretext for yet another market-distorting policy that empoverishes most but enriches large EU farmers.
RAEM

An article for you from Rolf A.E. Mueller.

2008-04-26T13:29:00.001+02:00

- AN ARTICLE FOR YOU, FROM ECONOMIST.COM -

Dear Evolution of Ag Blog,

Rolf A.E. Mueller (raem@agric-econ.uni-kiel.de) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.

The sender also included the following message for you:

A leader by the Economist on the 2008 food price crisis. RAEM

(Note: the sender's e-mail address above has not been verified.)

Subscribe to The Economist print edition, get great savings and FREE full access to Economist.com. Click here to subscribe:

http://www.economist.com/subscriptions/email

Alternatively subscribe to online only version by clicking on the link below and save 25%:

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THE SILENT TSUNAMI
Apr 17th 2008

Food prices are causing misery and strife around the world. Radical
solutions are needed

PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The
harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden
and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.

Today's pictures are different. "This is a silent tsunami," says
Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A
wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots
and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years,
food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in
turmoil (see article[2]); even China is worried (see article[4]).
Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya
Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.

Famine traditionally means mass starvation. The measures of today's
crisis are misery and malnutrition. The middle classes in poor
countries are giving up health care and cutting out meat so they can
eat three meals a day. The middling poor, those on $2 a day, are
pulling children from school and cutting back on vegetables so they can
still afford rice. Those on $1 a day are cutting back on meat,
vegetables and one or two meals, so they can afford one bowl. The
desperate--those on 50 cents a day--face disaster.

Roughly a billion people live on $1 a day. If, on a conservative
estimate, the cost of their food rises 20% (and in some places, it has
risen a lot more), 100m people could be forced back to this level, the
common measure of absolute poverty. In some countries, that would undo
all the gains in poverty reduction they have made during the past
decade of growth. Because food markets are in turmoil, civil strife is
growing; and because trade and openness itself could be undermined, the
food crisis of 2008 may become a challenge to globalisation.

FIRST FIND $700M
Rich countries need to take the food problems as seriously as they take
the credit crunch. Already bigwigs at the World Bank and the United
Nations are calling for a "new deal" for food. Their clamour is
justified. But getting the right kind of help is not so easy, partly
because food is not a one-solution-fits-all problem and partly because
some of the help needed now risks making matters worse in the long run.

The starting-point should be that rising food prices bear more heavily
on some places than others. Food exporters, and countries where farmers
are self-sufficient, or net sellers, benefit. Some countries--those in
West Africa which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge
numbers of landless labourers--risk ruin and civil strife. Because of
the severity there, the first step must be to mend the holes in the
world's safety net. That means financing the World Food Programme
properly. The WFP is the world's largest distributor of food aid and
its most important barrier between hungry people and starvation. Like a
$1-a-day family in a developing country, its purchasing power has been
slashed by the rising cost of grain. Merely to distribute the same
amount of food as last year, the WFP needs--and should get--an extra
$700m.

And because the problems in many places are not like those of a
traditional famine, the WFP should be allowed to broaden what it does.
At the moment, it mostly buys grain and doles it out in areas where
there is little or no food. That is necessary in famine-ravaged places,
but it damages local markets. In most places there are no absolute
shortages and the task is to lower domestic prices without doing too
much harm to farmers. That is best done by distributing cash, not
food--by supporting (sometimes inventing) social-protection programmes
and food-for-work schemes for the poor. The agency can help here,
though the main burden--tens of billions of dollars' worth--will be
borne by developing-country governments and lending institutions in the
West.

Such actions are palliatives. But the food crisis of 2008 has revealed
market failures at every link of the food chain (see article[5]). Any
"new deal" ought to try to address the long-term problems that are
holding poor farmers back.

THEN STOP THE DISTORTIONS
In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in
them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn,
from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to
leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is
to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed
out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food
chain: the international market.

For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor
farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another
government distortion--this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich
world--prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further
exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade
restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for
liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost
returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the
argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce
prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

There is an occasional exception to the rule that governments should
keep out of agriculture. They can provide basic technology: executing
capital-intensive irrigation projects too large for poor individual
farmers to undertake, or paying for basic science that helps produce
higher-yielding seeds. But be careful. Too often--as in Europe, where
superstitious distrust of genetic modification is slowing take-up of
the technology--governments hinder rather than help such advances.
Since the way to feed the world is not to bring more land under
cultivation, but to increase yields, science is crucial.

Agriculture is now in limbo. The world of cheap food has gone. With
luck and good policy, there will be a new equilibrium. The transition
from one to the other is proving more costly and painful than anyone
had expected. But the change is desirable, and governments should be
seeking to ease the pain of transition, not to stop the process itself.

-----
[1] http://www.economist.com/economist:doc-id=20080419/FJ8FOKL
[2] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=11058143
[3] http://www.economist.com/economist:doc-id=20080419/FJ8FOKT
[4] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=11058402
[5] http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=11049284

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IFPRI web site on current food prices

2008-04-25T22:01:00.001+02:00

IFPRI has a new web site with material on the current food prices bubble.

RAEM

Of income and incomers

2008-04-20T12:30:00.001+02:00

Tim Harford has written a nice piece on the suggestion by Pritchett and Clemens to measure the income of nationals rather than the income of nations. The first includes the income of people who have emigrated whereas the conventional measure does not include the income of emigrants.
The sentence that many economist may not like is this one:
"I sometimes wonder if these alternative measures make a difference to the way policy is conducted. After all, no government ever tried to maximise GDP anyway, so why try so hard to measure something else?"
RAEM

Diese Nachricht wurde Ihnen von RAEM via Google Reader gesendet.

Of income and incomers

via Tim Harford von Sophy, for Tim am 19.04.08

Which nation produces the richest people in the world? You might think that an easy question to answer: just grab the latest figures from the International Monetary Fund, and you'll see that the answer is Luxembourg ($102,000 gross domestic product per head in 2007). The US is in ninth place ($46,000) and the UK in 11th ($45,000).

There are some methodological wrinkles to iron out: what exchange rate to use, for instance. And for the poorest countries such as Liberia ($200 per person in 2007) or Burundi ($130), the numbers involve some guesswork. But overall, these are not controversial statistics – unless you are Lant Pritchett or Michael Clemens.

Pritchett, of Harvard's Kennedy School, and Clemens, of the Washington, DC, think-tank the Center for Global Development, argue that my opening question should be answered in a radically different way. Rather than measuring the income of people who are now residents of Liberia, Clemens and Pritchett have produced a research paper estimating the income earned by people who were born in, say, Liberia, regardless of where they now live – what Clemens and Pritchett call "income per natural" of Liberians.

For Luxembourg – or any other rich country – there is a trivial difference between income per natural and more conventional measures of national income. But for Liberia, the difference is anything but trivial: the Liberian-born make 50 per cent more than Liberian residents. Nor is Liberia unique: Clemens and Pritchett estimate that the income of the Samoan-born is nearly twice the income of the Samoan resident, and the Guyana-born are more than twice as well-off as residents of Guyana.

These dramatic differences have a simple explanation: many poor people became richer by leaving their country of birth. Clemens and Pritchett estimate that "two of every five living Mexicans who have escaped poverty did so by leaving Mexico; for Haitians it is four out of five".

There is a point to this exercise: Clemens and Pritchett want to draw attention to the fact that migration has made a lot of migrants richer. Traditional measures of income tend to mask this fact.

In rich countries, we usually ask whether migrants improve the lot of existing residents, not whether migration improves the lot of migrants. Meanwhile, the welfare of migrants rarely figures in debates in developing countries or in development institutions such as the World Bank, because the migrants have gone.

Simply because of the way the discussion is framed, the benefits to migrants tend to be ignored. Imagine a man who moves from earning €10,000 in Poland (an above-average wage) to £15,000 in the UK (a below-average wage). Simple arithmetic says that he has reduced the average income of both countries; that could be true even if he has impoverished nobody and enriched himself a great deal.

The "income per natural" statistic is the latest in a long line of alternatives to gross domestic product, the standard measure of an economy's size. Others – variously championed by Nobel laureates such as Amartya Sen, Daniel Kahneman, Joseph Stiglitz and the late James Tobin – try to adjust GDP to account for the depletion of natural resources, or to incorporate measures of health and education, or even (in Kahneman's case) to start from scratch with time-weighted accounts of happiness.

I sometimes wonder if these alternative measures make a difference to the way policy is conducted. After all, no government ever tried to maximise GDP anyway, so why try so hard to measure something else?

But Pritchett is convinced that the way the discussion is framed really does make a difference.

"I'm crazy," he told me. "I'm a lunatic. But I think we have a chance of changing the way the discourse is carried out."

Also published at ft.com, subscription free.

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Ag Price Bubble of 2007-200?

2008-04-17T22:55:00.003+02:00

Gary Becker and Richard Posner of Chicago University comment in their blog on the current price-bubble for ag commodities.
RAEM

The Market, Not Nature, Is Bountiful (by Don Boudreaux)

2008-04-13T16:40:00.001+02:00

Good observation by Don Boudreaux. Mother Nature holds her bounty with a clenched fist.
RAEM

Diese Nachricht wurde Ihnen von RAEM via Google Reader gesendet.

The Market, Not Nature, Is Bountiful (by Don Boudreaux)

via Cafe Hayek von Don Boudreaux am 11.04.08

Robert Kennedy, Jr., recently wrote this letter to the editor of the New York Times expressing his opposition to building hydroelectric dams in Chile. I sent my own letter in response to Mr. Kennedy's missive:

Robert Kennedy, Jr., might be correct that electricity is best provided in Chile by means other than hydroelectric dams (Letters, April 8). His presumption, however, about the source of prosperity casts doubt on the quality of his argument.

Mr. Kennedy opposes dams because he wants to protect "nature's bounty." But nature is not bountiful. If it were, human history would be one of prosperity and long, healthy lives rather than one of oppressive poverty and short, miserable lives. Nature is miserly. The bounty that Mr. Kennedy presumes comes from nature is, in fact, the relatively recent product of human creativity and industry unleashed by free markets - and now threatened by the mindless worship of nature.

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux

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Rising Food Prices: What Should Be Done?

2008-04-10T17:02:00.001+02:00

Joachim von Braun, DG of IFPRI, examines the impact of recent sharp increases in food prices on the food and nutrition situation of poor people in developing countries and recommends policy responses.
RAEM

New things to worry about

2008-03-21T14:18:00.002+01:00

Worrying about the same things gets boring more quickly than enjoying the same things. For those who are bored stiff by worrying about GMO-crops, loss of biodiversity or climate change, a group of UK academics has produced an new list of worry-iers.

At the bottom of the New Scientist news item is a link the Journal of Applied Ecology. The paper is open access and contains a table with all the worry-items. Pick your favorite!

RAEM

Finding missing markets - How the EU destroys markets

2008-03-17T18:53:00.002+01:00

Today's HBS Working Knowledge [workingknowledge@hbs.edu] included this item, which seems to be a well-documented case of how the EU destroys export markets for African farmers.

"Missing markets" as an outcome of too much government is not new but a reminder that it exists is always useful.
RAEM

Ashraf, N., Giné X., Karlan, D. 2008. Finding Missing Markets (and a disturbing epilogue): Evidence from an Export Crop Adoption and Marketing Intervention in Kenya.
Abstract
In much of the developing world, many farmers grow crops for local or personal consumption despite export options which appear to be more profitable. Thus many conjecture that one or several markets are missing. We report here on a randomized controlled trial conducted by DrumNet in Kenya that attempts to help farmers adopt and market export crops. DrumNet provides smallholder farmers with information about how to switch to export crops, makes in-kind loans for the purchase of the agricultural inputs, and provides marketing services by facilitating the transaction with exporters. The experimental evaluation design randomly assigns pre-existing farmer self-help groups to one of three groups: (1) a treatment group that receives all DrumNet services, (2) a treatment group that receives all DrumNet services except credit, or (3) a control group. After one year, DrumNet services led to an increase in production of export oriented crops and lower marketing costs; this translated into household income gains for new adopters. However, one year after the study ended, the exporter refused to continue buying the cash crops from the farmers because the conditions of the farms did not satisfy European export requirements. DrumNet collapsed in this region as farmers were forced to sell to middlemen and defaulted on their loans. The risk of such events may explain, at least partly, why many seemingly more profitable export crops are not adopted.

Small farmers and the modern supply chain

2008-03-06T18:21:00.002+01:00

The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) reports on the conference "Inclusive Business in Agrifood Markets: Evidence and Action" held at Bejing in March 08:

"The international conference, which runs from 5-6 March in Beijing, aims to answer questions such as:

Can the new food giants including supermarkets — which have increased in China for example from one supermarket in 1990 to over 53,000 today — and food companies be partners in the economic growth of rural areas?
Can small-scale farmers organise to meet the high expectations for food quality, safety, and quantity?
And can policy help to make successful market linkages between business and small-scale farming?

This conference is an initiative of the Regoverning Markets programme, which represents a global consortium of 15 institutions worldwide and is coordinated by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)."

"The Regoverning Markets consortium has just completed an intensive 3-year programme of research and policy dialogue.

Lessons from this work include the following:

The speed of modernisation in food retail and processing varies around the world, but can be very rapid. The way in which these changes filter through to the farm level depends on how agriculture is structured.
If dominated by small farms, then inclusion is very possible, as long as farmers have the required organisation and technology (such as irrigation for vegetables, or cooling tanks for milk). But a polarised farm economy such as that found in South Africa will mean that small-scale farmers are unlikely to be secure in modern organised markets.
Inclusion ultimately depends on a receptive business sector, conducive public policies and an engaged farming community. Often, specialised market intermediaries who have both a business and a development orientation can be important.
There is big challenge in meeting the growing demand for food quality, safety, and quantity in many developing countries where small farms dominate.
'Bridging the divide' to sustain the involvement of small-scale farmers as food markets restructure and modernise will require new coalitions of business, farming and public policy."

If the experience from agriculture in Europe is of any value for predicting the impact of supply chain modernisation, it is reasonable to expect that many small farmers will not be able to cope, either because they do not possess the required management skills or because they cannot or do not want to make the required investments.

RAEM

Massive support for Agriculture by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

2008-01-26T12:42:00.000+01:00

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is investing heavily - $ 306 million- in agriculture. The largest chunk of the money -$ 164.5 million - goes to the African Soil Health Program. IRRI gets a big chunck of the pie: 19.8 million for its Africa program.

Two projects are outside Africa: one is concerned with promoting micro-irrigation in India, the other with improving the dairy supply chain in Bangladesh.

RAEM

The other oil shock

2008-01-19T11:32:00.000+01:00

The NYT draws the attention of its readers to the other oil price shock, the palm oil price shock in Malysia: "An Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories".

The NYT also provides a nice set of slides and some data graphics showing the jump in palm oil prices.

RAEM

Before agriculture

2008-01-06T16:46:00.000+01:00

The Economist has a good article on hunter-gatherer societies and their evolution towards agriculture.

RAEM

The world needs more farmed fish

2007-12-28T18:53:00.000+01:00

"The world needs more farmed fish", The Economist writes on 07-12-27. Few would disagree.
RAEM

Gary Becker: Rising Food Prices and What That Means

2007-11-01T16:23:00.000+01:00

Gary Becker of the U. of Chicago discusses on his blog the current spike in food prices. He is fairly relaxed about the development. RAEM

TED-Talk: Eleni Gabre-Madhin: Building a commodities market in Ethiopia

2007-11-01T12:43:00.000+01:00

Eleni Gabre-Madhin, a former World Bank economist, is working to build Ethiopia's first commodities market. In her TED-talk she provides a very good summary of the woes of farm produce marketing in Africa. Having a well-functioning organized markets would certainly alleviate some of the deficiencies of farm produce markets in Ethiopia.

Getting an organized market place up and humming is a very challenging task as the providers of online market place have learned a few years ago. But entrepreneurship without great risks is like Hamlet without the prince.

RAEM

Weltwoche Interview Miersch-Borlaug

2007-10-16T14:09:00.000+02:00

Die Weltwoche 41/07 veroeffentlicht ein Interview, das Michael Miersch mit dem Nobelpreisträger und "Vater" der Gruenen Revolution Norman Borlaug gefuehrt hat.

Die Idee, Bio-Landbau sei "besser fuer den Planeten" haelt Borlaug fuer Unsinn; bzgl des Risikos der Gentechnik meint Borlaug: "Das Problem ist, dass die Reichen und Verwöhnten eine Null-Risiko-Gesellschaft wollen. Aber es gibt kein Null-Risiko in der biologischen Welt. Wir sollten aufhören, so überängstlich zu sein." Und weiter: "Die Debatte um grüne Gentechnik ist aus meiner Sicht eine Debatte der Reichen auf Kosten der Armen."

RAEM

NYT: World Bank Neglects African Farming, Study Says

2007-10-15T15:41:00.001+02:00

An independent evaluation study of the World Bank's activtities in Africa found that agriculture has been neglected, the NYT reports.

RAEM

Green revolution woes in Africa

2007-10-13T20:16:00.000+02:00

The New York Times reports about the difficulties of getting a green revolution started in Africa.

RAEM

Business - Hope for Africa

2007-05-31T11:57:00.000+02:00

At the Monterey TED-Talks the first female Finance Minister in Nigeria, Ngozi Okonji-Iweala gave an excellent speech which can be viewed at the TED site.

I tended to consider Africa to be quite resistent to development. But people like Okonji-Iwaela infuse hope for Africa.

RAEM

Small steps into the right direction

2007-04-24T19:17:00.000+02:00

The Marginal Revolution blog reports about progress in the African villages that have been adopted by Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University Professor, author of "The end of poverty" and head of the independent advisory body that drafted for the then UN Secertary Kofi Annan the report "Investing in development. A practical plan to achieve the Millenium Development Goals". The "Millenium Villages" are part of the "Millenium Project".

During this month (April 07) Jeffry Sachs is delivering the BBS's Reith Lectures. If you can, take the time to listen to Sachs or read the transcripts later.
RAEM

Do we see the re-greening of the Sahel?

2007-02-11T12:51:00.000+01:00

My first assignment abroad was in 1977 in the Tahoua region of Niger. Several aid agencies had regional development projects in Niger. The German government could not stand back and GTZ - the German arm of technical aid - send me and two more experienced development aid experts to the Tahoua region. After we had spent several days at Niamey where we exchanged business cards with representatives of the many government agencies who might have some interest in the development of the area, we finally decamped to Tahoua district. There we spent a couple of weeks or so travelling the countryside and having a look at the type of agriculture and farming systems practiced in three subdistricts.
Things were quite grim at the time. There was no trace of the Green Revolution that already had done wonders to India. The most modern thing I could see was a new type of donkey cart that was sold to farmers equipped with Michelin tyres that could run up to 180 km/h or so.
I remember a chat with an old fellow in one village who spoke some French and who was of the opinion that the area could be improved if trees were planted in large numbers because that would bring back the rains. I thought the chap was nuts - confusing cause and effect.
Whatever the causality might be, I was pleased to read today in the New York Times that trees are coming back in Niger together with the rains. Let us hope that the goats don't notice.
There is a lesson in the story: Whatever the development experts tell you - remain sceptical. Everybody knew that the desert is relentlessly moving southward in the Sahel. The story suggests that it may be halted.
RAEM

Aids in Africa

2007-01-03T09:52:00.000+01:00

Emily Oster writes in Esquire about "Three Things You Don't Know About Aids In Africa."

The three things are:
1) "There is potential for significant reductions in HIV transmission in Africa through the treatment of other sexually transmitted diseases.
Such an approach would cost around $3.50 per year per life saved. Treating AIDS itself costs around $300 per year. There are reasons to provide AIDS treatment in Africa, but cost-effectiveness is not one of them."

2) " if income and life expectancy in Africa were the same as they are in the United States, we would see the same change in sexual behavior?and the AIDS epidemic would begin to slow.

3) "... HIV rates reported by the UN are about three times too high. Which sounds like good news?but isn't. The overall number of HIV-positive people may be lower than we thought, but my study, which estimated changes in the infection rate over time, also drew a second, chilling conclusion: In Africa, HIV is spreading as quickly as ever. "

RAEM

Tierhaltung und Umwelt

2006-12-14T20:32:00.000+01:00

Unter dem Titel "Cows, pigs and sheep: Environment's greatest threats?" weist der New Scientist vom 14. Dezember 2006 auf eine Studie der FAO zur Bedeutung der Tierhaltung in der Welt für die natürlich Umwelt hin.
Der New Scientist ist der Ansicht: "Perhaps the report's most striking finding is that the livestock sector accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions ? more than transport, which emits 13.5%."
Das mag stimmen; aber was ist die Konsequenz? Fleisch höher besteuern als Benzin um den Verbrauch zu beschränken? Um mehr zu erfahren muss man sich vermutlich den FAO-Bericht "Livestock's long shadow" ansehen.

RAEM

Becker and Posner discuss the population problem

2006-10-18T13:14:00.000+02:00

On their blog of Oct. 15th 2006 the Chicago economists Gary Becker and Richard Posner present their answers to the question: "Should We Worry about Overpopulation?"

RAEM

World Food Day 2006

2006-10-16T08:52:00.000+02:00

Today, as every year on October 16th, the UN and FAO celebrate World Food Day.

RAEM

Global warming and the size of knickers: are they correlated?

2006-09-30T23:35:00.000+02:00

I used to be a sceptic with regard to global warming but now I am not so sure any more. Today by some chance I came across the website of Henryk M. Broder, a well known writer on political affairs in Germany. On his website he had the "Picture of the Day" that is shown at the left (I reproduce it here because I don't know for how long it will be accessible at Broder's website).

My first reaction was "Wow"- not because I am easily over-awed by sight of knickers, I am beyond puberty, after all. No, there is such a strong correlation between the size or volume of the knickersfrom different periods and what global warming-prophets make us believe about the warming of mother earth.

But then, on second inspection of the picture, my doubts crept up again. There is a serious problem. Climatologists usually argue that the warming of mother earth will accelerate. But accelerating temperature increases will not correlate closely with the size of knickers which is obviously decreasing at a decreasing rate.

I thought of collecting some date on knicker size and volume, and of average surface temperatures on the face of mother earth, and running correlations between the data. But then my wife thought that would be overly pedantic. Instead of running SPSS I had a glass of wine and wrote this entry into my blog.

RAEM

Rain causes vegetation - or is it the other way around?

2006-09-29T13:19:00.000+02:00

In the late 70s I spend a stint as an agricultural consultant for GTZ in the Tahoua region of Niger in the Sahel region of West Africa. Our job was to do a prefeasibility study for a rural regional development project. The World Bank had a project of this kind in Niger, the Americans had one, the European Union had one, the Canadians had one, and Germany had to have one too.

We had to travel around the countryside a lot because documents describing the area were hard to come by. The area was -and stiil is - dry; millet was the main crop and cattle herding was an important industry. Naturally, when we talked with farmers, teachers, and others talk quickly turned to lack of water and the unreliability of rainfall. In one place we met an elderly fellow who suggested that we should plant lots of trees because then the rains would come because wherever there are trees rains fall. At the time I thought this was a crackpot idea grounded in the confusion of correlation with causation. But now, with the help of satellite data and more advanced weather models scientists have come to believe that "More Plants Make More Rain" News@Nature.com reports.

RAEM

More on fair trade: Wikipedia

2006-09-29T07:40:00.000+02:00

Yesterday in my entry on fair trade I failed to mention Wikipedia which has a fairly long entry on fair trade.

The Library of Economics also has several entries on fair trade. The top-most entry is, however, concerned with an understandung of fair trade which was discussed at the end of the 19th century. At that time "fair trade" stood for the idea that "by applying to each foreign country a tariff of duties which would correspond as nearly as possible to the tariff which such country enforced against its imports of British products". One could also call this principle the "tit-for-tat" principle of foreign trade.

RAEM

World Bank Study: Fairtrade and market failures in agricultural commodity markets

2006-09-28T20:05:00.000+02:00

"Fair trade" is quite popular in some development circles. I am not an expert on the arrangement but fair trade arrangements seem to have two components: a small absolute increase in the price that farmers' receive for their products and a much larger absolute increase that consumers of fair trade products are charged. Because there is usually are large spread between the price paid to farmers for the raw product (e.g coffee beans) and the price consumers pay for the processed product - their mocha latte or whatever. When the price spread between the prices paid to farmers and the prices charged to consumers is large, a small absolute price increase in farmers' price may be higher in percentage terms than a large absolute increase the consumers are charged for the fair trade product.

Several economists have looked at fair trade arrangements as a sort of product bundling device (coffee+ doing something good for the poor) or as a price discrimination device (inducing consumers to signal a high willingness to pay for coffee) (e.g. Tim Harford, author if the "Undercover Economist", Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist and author of a best-selling textbook, or the World Bank).

There also is a literature that tries to identify the impact of fair trade arrangements on producers. The Word Bank has published a new study "Fairtrade and market failures in agricultural commodity markets" where the author analyses the impact of fair trade arrangements on the market for coffee in Costa Rica. The study finds a positive impact of fair trade on the efficiency of cooperatives and on the prices paid to farmers for their coffee. The study also finds that, contrary to the folklore of anti-globalists, large multinational firms are not the ones who squeeze small farmers the most:

"Finally, the results also suggest that producers selling to vertically integrated, multinational coffee mills face lower producer price 'mark-downs' compared with domestically owned non-cooperative mills. This result contradicts the popular view that the increasing concentration of vertically integrated multinational firms accounts for a decline in producers' share of coffee returns."

RAEM

Borlaug Lecture at the Center for Global Development, Washington, DC, Sept, 6th, 2006

2006-09-20T13:35:00.000+02:00

The article "A seedbed of revolution" in the Economist of Sept. 16th 2006 has made me aware of a lecture that Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Peace prize of 1970 and one of the fathers of the Green Revolution, has given recently at the Center for Global Development. The lecture is an excellent summary of the key ingredients of the Green Revolution: high-yielding varieties (HYV), availabilty of fertilizer and pesticides, railways and roads to transport seed, fertilizer, pesticides, and produce to and from farming areas, strong market demand, and policies that provide, or at least do not eliminate, external incentives for farmers to grow more food.

The lecture, which lasts for about 46 min is available in Quicktime-format. Borlaug, he is 92 years of age, is not always the most energic speaker but he has one advantage: he has something to say. Given his age, he is unlikely to give many similar speeches and his lecture is a historical document. Anybody with the slightest interest in agricultural development should have enough time to listen to the lecture.

The article in the Economist reports on attempts by the G&M Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to kindle a green revolution in Africa. The plan is to provide support for crop breeding, training of crop scientists, and for the improvement of farm input supply chains, including the provision of rural credit.

There are no plans to improve rural infrastructure; the dire state of roads and the widespread absence of railroads and navigable rivers makes transport of bulky goods, like fertilizer, extremely expensive in Africa. Some time ago, The Economist had a very good article illustrating the problems of road transport in Africa. I had talked about that in my blog entry of
June 6th, 2006.

RAEM

Agriculture: The dark side of India

2006-09-19T09:42:00.000+02:00

India is currently portrayed as the coming Asian success story. Much is happening in the cities and the middleclasses are said to prosper. And in India, unlike China, economic progress happens amidst civil liberties.

But India still has a dark side. Agriculture seems to have difficulties to keep pace with the rest of the economy. The New York Times today published a stark reminder that India should not leave its agriculture behind.

RAEM

Weltbevölkerung & Armut

2006-07-20T21:30:00.000+02:00

Heute kam in meinem Email-Ordner der Juli-Newsletter der Deutschen Stiftung Weltbevölkerung an - wie immer voller Sorge über das Wachstum der Weltbevölkerung, insbesondere jedoch mit Sorge über das Bevölkerungswachstum in Afrika.

Wie es sich für eine Organisation gehört, deren Geschäftsmodell in der Steigerung der Spendenbreitschaft durch weite Verbreitung besorgniserregender Statistiken besteht, finden sich in dem Newsletter die altbekannten Fakten zur Weltbevölkerung, die überwiegend plausibel aussehen und vermutlich auch richtig sind. Ebenso altbekannt, aber deswegen noch lange nicht überzeugend, sind einige Aussagen, mit denen die Zahlen kommentiert werden.

Da liest man im Beitrag "Bevölkerungswachstum erschwert Armutsbekämpfung" solch merkwürdige Aussagen wie: "Das schnelle Bevölkerungswachstum in vielen Entwicklungsländern verstärkt den Druck auf die Ressourcen sowie die Gesundheits- und Bildungssysteme. Investitionen in Familienplanung und Gesundheit sind daher unerlässlich." Wieso Investitionen in Familienplanung wegen des Drucks auf die Gesundheitssysteme und Bildungssysteme unerlässlich sind, ist keineswegs offensichtlich. Diese Massnahmen sind sicherlich dazu geeignet einen gewissen Beitrag zum Abbau der"Drucks" auf die Ressourcen zu leisten; sie sind jedoch nicht "unerlässlich" zur Verminderung des Drucks, da es auch noch andere Massnahmen gib, wie z.B. den Bau von Schulen oder den Ausbau der Gesundheitssysteme.

Weiterhin ist zu lesen: "Vor allem in den Ländern Schwarzafrikas, in denen die Grundbedürfnisse der meisten Menschen schon heute nicht befriedigt werden können, wächst die Bevölkerung rasant". Natürlich fragt man sich, wie das gehen kann: Die Grundbedürfnisse sind nicht befriedigt und dennoch wächst die Bevölkerung. Ganz offensichtlich sind die Grundbedürfnisse vieler Angehörigen der Generation, die sich in der reproduktiven Phase befindet, mehr als befriedigt, sonst könnte diese Generation wohl kaum Kinder grossziehen.

Im naechsten Abschnitt heisst es dann: "Bis zum Jahr 2050 wird die Region [Afrika] von heute 752 Millionen auf 1,7 Milliarden Menschen anwachsen. "Wenn wir Armut und Hunger in Afrika bekämpfen wollen, ist es daher dringend notwendig Familienplanung, Aufklärung und Gesundheit dort stärker zu fördern", so Maas [das ist der GF der DSW]." In Deutschland schrumpft die einheimische Bevölkerung. Dennoch nimmt die Armut in Deutschland zu. Wenn Schrumpfen der Bevölkerung nicht zu vermehrtem Reichtum führt, wie kann die Armut dann durch ein verlangsamtes Wachstum der Bevölkerung verringert werden?

Schliesslich führt der Newsletter aus: "Bis 2050 wird sich die ugandische Bevölkerung von 27,7 auf 130 Millionen mehr als vervierfachen. Das bedeutet, dass 100 Millionen Menschen mehr versorgt werden müssen." Wer versorgt eigentlich die Bevölkerung? Der Staat? Die spendensammelnden NRO? Oder ist es vielleicht noch immer so, wie es schon zu Adam Smiths Zeiten war:

"Nicht vom Wohlwollen des Metzgers, Brauers und Bäckers erwarten wir das, was wir zum Essen brauchen, sondern davon, daß sie ihre eigenen Interessen wahrnehmen. Wir wenden uns nicht an ihre Menschen- sondern an ihre Eigenliebe, und wir erwähnen nicht die eigenen Bedürfnisse, sondern sprechen von ihrem Vorteil. Niemand möchte weitgehend vom Wohlwollen seiner Mitmenschen abhängen, außer einem Bettler, und selbst der verläßt sich nicht allein darauf. ... Auch ein Bettler deckt seinen gelegentlichen Bedarf überwiegend wie alle anderen Menschen, nämlich durch Verhandeln, Tausch und Kauf." (Adam Smith, 1776 Wohlstand der Nationen, S 17. Übersetzung Claus Recktenwald 1974, München: C.H. Beck).

RAEM

Fische gegen Mohn? Wenn das mal gut geht!

2006-07-19T11:41:00.000+02:00

Ich war gerade im Web unterwegs auf der Suche nach guten Links zu Aquakultur. Ich habe auch einen guten Link gefunden: Es ist das Portal OneFish, das auch einen Bereich für die Aquakultur enthält.

Dort bei der Aquakultur bin ich dann auf einen Verweis auf eine Mitteilung von UPI gestossen, die vom kuriosen Versuch der Regierung Afghanistans berichtet, mit Hilfe von Aquakultur die Bauern vom Mohnanbau abzubringen. Die Begründung ist Importsubstitution - ein uralter Hut, auf den immer noch Steuermittel verschwendet werden.

Nur - wessen Steuermitttel? Es ist unwahrscheinlich, dass die 4,8 Mio US$, die die Regierung Afghanistans für diese Narretei ausgeben wird, aus eigenen Mitteln des total verarmten Landes kommen. Sehr wahrscheinlich sind es Mittel aus der Entwicklungshilfe, d.h. Steuermittel aus dem westlichen Ländern, die hier "den Bach heruntergehen" werden.

RAEM

Bill & Melinda Gates am Ort des Elends

2006-07-19T07:40:00.000+02:00

Gestern am 18/07/06 hat die FAZ im Feuilleton unter dem Titel "Gipfel der Gönner" über die Aktivitäten von Bill & Melinda Gates und ihrer Stiftung berichtet. Die Gates schauen sich offenbar sehr genau an, wofür sie ihr Geld - und das von Warren Buffett - ausgeben.

Der Titel weist auf die Zusammenarbeit der B&M Gates-Stiftung mit der Clinton Stiftung des ehemaligen Präsidenten der Vereinigten Staaten, Bill Clinton, hin.

RAEM

Cannabis Anbau in Marokko

2006-07-18T08:40:00.000+02:00

Unter dem Titel "Making a hash of it - Why it is hard to stop Moroccans growing a lucrative crop" berichtet der "Economist" in seinem Heft vom 15. July 2006 auf S. 38 ueber den Cannabis-Anbau im Rif-Gebirge von Marokko.

Der Artikel geht kurz auf die Bedeutung des Cannabis-Anbaus fuer diese, von der Regierung ueber lange Zeit vernachlaessigte Region, ein. Die Bauern wird man bei den gegenwaertigen Preisen schwerlich vom Cannabis-Anbau abhalten koennen: Cannabis-Anbau erloest ein Vielfaches vom Weizenanbau.

Als ich mich im Web nach einem brauchbaren Link zum Rif-Gebirge umgesehen habe, bin ich auf einen Film "Haschisch" gestossen, der vom Rif Verleih in Koeln produziert wurde. Nach Angaben der Website geht es in dem Film um die untauglichen Versuche der EU und Marokkos den Cannabis-Anbau zu unterbinden. Der Versuch hat die Steuerzahler der EU 1, 9 Milliarden Euro gekostet. Der Erfolg ist nach Angaben zum Film gleich Null. Sollte das stimmen, waere es kein ungewoehnliches Ergebnis fuer eine Massnahme der Entwicklungshilfe.

(making a hash of something: ein Durcheinander anrichten; etwas vermasseln)

RAEM

James W. Vaupel: Dem Alter eine neue Zukunft geben

2006-07-16T18:46:00.000+02:00

Im neuesten Heft (2/2006) der "MaxPlanckForschung", das ist das allgemeinverstaendliche Wissenschaftsmagazin der Max-Plack-Gesellschaft, plaediert James Vaupel vom Max-Planck-Institut fuer Bevoelkerungforschung in Rostock fuer eine ausgeglichenere Verteilung der Arbeitszeit im Lebenslauf.

Vaupel ist einer der fuehrenden Bevoelkerungswissenschaftler der Welt. Er schreibt:

"Vielleicht werden kommende Generationen kopfschüttelnd auf diesen korsettartig gebundenen Lebensplan zurückblicken und sich fragen, warum die Lebenszeit ihrer Eltern und Großeltern nicht ausgeglichener verlebt wurde, warum so viele Möglichkeiten nicht genutzt wurden, warum sie in der Mitte des Lebens so überfordert und später so unterfordert waren, warum sie womöglich wegen der Arbeitsbelastung auf gewünschte Kinder verzichtet haben, anstatt ihre Arbeitszeit erst zu maximieren, wenn die Kinder erwachsen sind. Die alternde Gesellschaft fordert vom Einzelnen eine aktivere Gestaltung seines Lebenslaufs."

RAEM

Wein: Kulturgut oder verbotene Droge?

2006-07-16T13:09:00.000+02:00

Rod Phillips leitet seine "Short History of Wine" (New York:HarperCollins; 2000) mit einer Anekdote ein, die die kultur-bedingten Unterschiede in der Einstellung zum Lebensmittel Wein zwischen europäischen und islamischen Ländern verdeutlicht:

"In October 1999, plans for a state visit to France by the president of Iran were abandoned because of a dispute over wine at a state dinner. Invoking Muslim law, the president declared that not only could he not drink wine, but he could not even sit at a table where wine was served. For their part, the French authorities declared that such a dinner without wine - French wine, of course - was unthinkable. The diner was cancelled and, because protocol demands that a state visit must include a state baquet, the visit itself had to be downgraded from 'state visit' to 'official visit'."

Phillips erläutert, dass Mohamed im 7. Jahrhundert den Gläubigen den Genuss von Wein auf Erden verboten hat; erst im Paradies dürften sie Wein trinken.

RAEM

Rosen(-Öl) gegen Mohn (-Opium) in Afghanistan

2006-07-15T17:34:00.000+02:00

In Afghanistan versucht die Deutsche Welthungerhilfe mit dem Anbau von Rosen zur Gewinnung von Rosenoel den Mohnanbau zu verdraengen. Dies berichtet die FAZ vom 15/07/06 unter dem Titel "Rosen gegen die internationale Drogenmafia".
Norbert Burger, Agraroekonom und Projektleiter der Welthungerhilfe, ist sich dabei der Grenzen der Substitution bewusst: "Es gibt keine legale Pflanze, die mit Opium konkurrieren kann", sagt er. Und die FAZ ergaenzt: "Zwar können die Bauern mit dem Rosenanbau etwa dreimal soviel verdienen wie mit anderen legalen Früchten, zum Beispiel Weizen, doch Opium bringt im Durchschnitt noch immer mehr als doppelt soviel ein."

RAEM

Was die Bill & Melinda Gates Stiftung foerdert

2006-07-14T19:19:00.000+02:00

Die Zeit berichtet in ihrer Ausgabe vom 13/07/06 ueber die Foerderungsaktivitaeten der Bill und Melinda Gates (BMG) Foundation. Offensichtlich soll das meiste Geld in die Entwicklung von medizinischen Techniken gehen, z.B. fuer die Ausrottung der Tuberkulose.

In der Entwicklungsoekonomie gibt es eine Debatte ueber die Ursachen des hohen Lebensstandards in der westlichen Welt: nach einer Ansicht (z.B. der von Angus Deaton von der Princeton University) waren Fortschritte in der oeffentlichen Gesundheit (public health) die Ausloeser der phaenomenalen Verbesserung des Lebensstandards, nach einer anderen Ansicht, die z.B. von Robert Fogel von der University of Chicago vertreten wird, war es vor allem die bessere Ernaehrung, die die Grundlage fuer unseren hohen Lebensstandard gelegt hat.

Bill und Melinda Gates glauben offensichtlich nicht an die "Ernaehrungstheorie". Nach meiner Ansicht liegen die Gates falsch: ihr Geld und das von Warren Buffett waere vermutlich besser in die Entwicklung verbesserter landwirtschatlicher Produktionsverfahren und besserer Lebensmittelversorgung angelegt. Aber die Gates und Warren Buffett geben ihr eigenes Geld aus und nicht meines (oder das anderer Steuerzahler).

PS: Einen kurzen knappen Einstieg in die Diskussion ueber die Verzueglichkeit von oeffentlicher Gesundheit einerseit und Ernaehrung andererseits gibt Angus Deaton in seiner Besprechung im Journal of Economic Literature von "The escape from hunger and premature death, 1700 - 2100" von Robert Fogel. Diese Besprechung koennen Sie vom MML aus einsehen unter: H:\e_zines\JEL. Dort anklicken: splash.pdf und dann zum Heft March 2006 des JEL gehen. Dort finden Sie dann den Beitrag von Angus Deaton.

RAEM

Internet in China

2006-07-14T18:53:00.000+02:00

Die FAZ hat am 13/07/06 im Feuilleton eine lose Serie von Artikeln ueber das Internet in China angekuendigt.

In China gibt es z.Z. 115 Millionen Internet-Nutzer - das Medium ist also wichtigt. Offen ist z.Z. jedoch wie das Internet langfristig genutzt werden kann, und welche Auswirkungen es auf die freie Meinungsaeusserung in China haben wird. Das bisherige Verhalten der durch und durch undemokratischen, despotischen kommunistischen Partei Chinas laesst nicht viel Gutes erwarten.

Bemerkenswert ist auch der folgende Absatz aus dem Eroeffnungsbeitrag der FAZ:
"Selbstverständlich konzentrieren sich die 115 Millionen chinesischen Internetnutzer auf die verschiedenen regionalen Wachstumszonen, während der Rest des Landes drastisch zurückbleibt. Allerdings ist es beeindruckend, daß die digitale Kluft zwischen Arm und Reich oder Stadt und Land in den letzten Jahren abgenommen hat. Während 1998 rund fünf Prozent der Bevölkerung über rund siebzig Prozent aller Internetanschlüsse verfügten, sind es zu Anfang dieses Jahres nur noch vierzig Prozent der Zugänge. Freilich dürfte die Frage nach einem Internetanschluß für die achthundert Millionen Menschen in den ländlichen Regionen Chinas unwichtig sein. Hier geht es noch immer um Hunger, unerträglichen Land- und Eigentumsraub durch lokale Funktionäre der Kommunistischen Partei und zunehmende gewaltsame Bauernaufstände dagegen."

Im ersten Beitrag der Serie geht es um die Bedeutung des Bloggens in China. Ein Medium der freien, aufgeklaerten Meinungsaeusserung ist das Bloggen in China offenbar nicht.

RAEM

Spore, Issue 123, June 2006

2006-07-10T11:43:00.000+02:00

Die Zeitschirft "Spore : Information for agricultural development in ACP countries" wird alle zwei Monate vom Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in Wageningen, Niederlande harausgegeben. Spore enthällt meistens ein Fülle von nützlichen Informationen zur Landwirtschaft in den ACP-Ländern. Hier ist meine Auswahl aus Hinweisen und Info-Quellen aus dem neusten Heft von Spore:

1) Datenbank mit Marktpreisen des West African Market Information Network (RESIMAO) mit Preisstatistiken für rd. 30 landwirtschaftliche Produkte aus Benin, Burkina Faso, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal und Togo.

2) Eine kommentierte Liste mit Links zu Websites zum Thema Bio-Energie.

3) Online Verzeichnis von Organisationen der Entwicklungshilfe
Das Verzeichnis hat Suchfunktionen und ermoeglicht den Benutzern die Einrichtung einer eingenen, persoenlichen Liste.

RAEM

Altersstruktur primitiver Jäger- und Ackerbau-Stämme

2006-07-01T12:22:00.000+02:00

Die Zeitschrift Science berichtet in ihrem Heft vom 30 Juni 2006 auf S.1867 von neuen Erkenntnissen zur Alterstruktur und Lebenserwartung in primitiven Stämmen in Bolivien.

Untersuchungen von Michael Gurven von der UC Santa Barbara zeigen, dass 40-50% der Kinder dieser Stämme das Alter von 15 Jahren nicht erreichen. Danach sehen die Überlebenschancen besser aus: Ein 15-Jähriger hat eine 40%-Chance das 65. Lebensjahr zu erreichen. Die Mortalitätsraten der 70-Jährigen entsprechen denen von Gleichaltrigen in den USA.

Gurven hat auch ermittelt, wie sich die Produktivität dieser Menschen im Verlauf ihres Lebens verändert. Was die Leute produzieren hängt, wie könnte es anders sein, mehr von deren Fertigkeiten und Wissen als von ihren physischen Kräften ab. Obwohl die Männer in ihren Zwanzigern das Maximum an Kraft erreichen, wird der Höhepunkt der Jagd-Fertigkeiten 20 Jahre später in den Vierzigern erreicht. Als Reisbauern werden die Männer erst richtig produktiv wenn sie älter als 50 Jahre sind, und sich Tätigkeiten zuwenden, die weniger anstrengend sind als die Jagd.

RAEM

Herwig Birg und 13 Legenden der demographischen Entwicklung in Deutschland

2006-06-29T14:07:00.000+02:00

In der FAZ vom Mi, 28/06/06 entzaubert Herwig Birg 13 Legenden über die demographische Entwicklung in Deutschland.

Der Autor, so berichtet die FAZ, "war bis 2004 Leiter des Instituts für Bevölkerungsforschung und Sozialpolitik der Universität Bielefeld und Präsident der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Demographie. Er lebt in Berlin ... "

Hier sind die Legenden und die Richtigstellungen in Auszügen:

LEGENDE 1: Deutschland steht ?vor? einer demographischen Herausforderung.
Die Herausforderung selbst besteht schon seit 1972. Seit diesem Jahr ist die Zahl der Sterbefälle größer als die der Geburten.

LEGENDE 2: Die Demographen wissen nicht, was sie wollen. Sie redeten jahrzehntelang über die Gefahr einer Bevölkerungsexplosion, jetzt soll es plötzlich ein Problem der Bevölkerungsimplosion geben
In der Fachdemographie war die Gleichzeitigkeit von Bevölkerungsexplosion und -implosion immer ein Hauptthema. Die Welt besteht aus rund hundertachtzig Ländern, so gut wie keines befindet sich im demographischen Gleichgewicht. Entweder schrumpfen die Länder, oder sie wachsen. Deutschland ist das erste Land der Welt, in dem sich der von der Bevölkerungstheorie lange vorausgesagte Übergang vom Bevölkerungswachstum in die -schrumpfung vollzog.

LEGENDE 3: Langfristige Bevölkerungsprognosen sind unmöglich oder beruhen auf Kaffeesatzleserei.
Anders als Wirtschaftsprognosen sind langfristige Bevölkerungsprognosen ziemlich treffsicher, wenn sie von Fachdemographen durchgeführt werden. ... Die hohe Treffsicherheit demographischer Vorausberechnungen beruht auf dem großen Einfluß der Altersstruktur auf die Zahl der Geburten und Sterbefälle, während sie von Änderungen des Fortpflanzungs- verhaltens über eine oder zwei Generationen vergleichsweise wenig abhängt.

LEGENDE 4: Es ist zu begrüßen, daß die Bevölkerung in Deutschland schrumpft, weil das Bevölkerungswachstum in der Dritten Welt dadurch ausgeglichen wird.
Das demographische Gewicht Deutschlands ist viel zu klein, als daß es das Wachstum der Weltbevölkerung auch nur annähernd ausgleichen könnte. Deutschland hat einen Anteil von 1,4 Prozent an der Weltbevölkerung. Selbst wenn Deutschland überhaupt keine Einwohner mehr hätte, läge die Änderung der Weltbevölkerungszahl im Fehlerspielraum der Weltbevölkerungsprognosen. Das Verschwinden Deutschlands würde rein numerisch nicht einmal auffallen.

LEGENDE 5: Die Geburtenrate könnte ja vielleicht wieder zunehmen, dann würde die Schrumpfung aufhören, und alle Prognosen wären falsch.
Selbst wenn die Geburtenrate in den nächsten ein bis zwei Jahrzehnten allmählich den bestandserhaltenden Wert von zwei Kindern je Paar erreichen würde, ginge die Schrumpfung der Bevölkerung bis in die zweite Hälfte des nächsten Jahrhunderts einfach weiter.

LEGENDE 6: Deutschland braucht Einwanderer.
Deutschland verfolgt seit Jahrzehnten eine kompensatorische Einwanderungspolitik, indem es sich zum Ziel setzt, die im Inland fehlenden Geburten durch die Geburten anderer Länder zu ersetzen. Man muß aber von demographischem Kolonialismus sprechen, wenn im ?Wettbewerb um die Besten? die Früchte der Erziehungs- und Ausbildungsleistungen anderer Länder ohne Gegenleistungen beansprucht werden.

LEGENDE 7: Die demographische Alterung beruht besonders auf der hohen und weiter wachsenden Lebenserwartung.
Die demographische Alterung beruht in wesentlich stärkerem Maße auf dem Rückgang der Geburtenrate als auf dem Anstieg der Lebenserwartung. Sie wäre aber auch bei einer deutlichen Zunahme der Geburtenrate in den nächsten fünfzig Jahren nicht mehr abwendbar.

LEGENDE 8: Es ist nicht schlimm, daß die Bevölkerungszahl in Deutschland schrumpft, weil zum Beispiel die Umwelt davon profitiert.
Besorgniserregend ... die Scheren-Entwicklung zwischen der stark wachsenden Zahl der älteren und der gleichzeitig schrumpfenden Zahl der mittleren und jüngeren Altersgruppen.

LEGENDE 9: Die durch die demographische Alterung hervorgerufenen demographischen Belastungen des sozialen Sicherungssystems lassen sich durch Produktivitätssteigerungen auffangen.
Eine Steigerung der Produktivität und des Pro-Kopf-Einkommens um das Doppelte bis 2050 würde nicht ausreichen, um die demographisch bedingt steigenden Lasten spürbar auszugleichen.

LEGENDE 10: Wenn die von den Demographen vorausberechnete Entwicklung wirklich einträfe, lohnte es sich ohnehin nicht mehr, über Abwehrmaßnahmen nachzudenken.
Die dargestellte Entwicklung beruht auf der mittleren Variante der Bevölkerungsprognosen. Jede Variante, so katastrophal sie auch ist, kann durch eine noch schlechtere unterboten werden. Deshalb sind Handeln und energisches Gegensteuern unerläßlich.

LEGENDE 11: Es wird schon genug von den Kinderlosen für die Familien getan
In vielen Untersuchungen wurde nachgewiesen, daß Menschen mit Kindern die Gruppe der Kinderlosen unter dem Strich unterstützen, nicht umgekehrt.

LEGENDE 12: Früher mag es viele Kinder gegeben haben, weil Frauen nicht erwerbstätig waren, aber heute ist dieser Zusammenhang positiv, wie beispielsweise die skandinavischen Länder und Frankreich zeigen, wo ein großer Teil der Frauen arbeitet und es zugleich wesentlich mehr Kinder gibt als in Deutschland. Deshalb würden auch in Deutschland mehr Kinder geboren, wenn mehr Frauen erwerbstätig wären.
Der oft behauptete positive Zusammenhang zwischen der Geburtenrate und der Frauenerwerbsquote existiert nicht, er beruht auf Wunschdenken und hält einer empirischen Prüfung nicht stand.

LEGENDE 13: Die Bevölkerungsschrumpfung ist nichts Negatives, sie bietet sogar Chancen.
Die unvermeidliche Hauptwirkung der demographischen Veränderungen ist eine extreme Zunahme der sozialen Gegensätze und des gesellschaftlichen Konfliktpotentials: erstens zwischen den Generationen, zweitens zwischen Menschen mit und ohne Kinder, drittens zwischen den Zugewanderten und den nicht Zugewanderten und viertens zwischen den Bundesländern, Regionen und Kommunen.

FAZIT

Sollte Deutschland einmal alles getan haben, um die vielfältigen Auswirkungen der demographischen Veränderungen zu bewältigen, hätte es noch nichts getan, um deren Ursachen in den Griff zu bekommen. Die Bevölkerungsschrumpfung endet nicht bei runden Jahreszahlen wie 2030, 2050 oder 2100, sie geht so lange weiter, wie sie von der seit Jahrzehnten auf dem Niveau von 1,3 bis 1,4 Kindern pro Frau konstanten Geburtenrate, also durch die millionenfachen persönlichen Entscheidungen der Bürger für oder gegen Kinder, in Gang gehalten wird. Die Entscheidung für oder gegen Kinder ist und muß frei bleiben. Aber Bürger und die Politiker sollten nicht Legenden folgen, sondern wissen, was sie tun, wenn sie die wirtschaftlichen, gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Rahmenbedingungen dieser Entscheidungen so gestalten, daß eine niedrige Geburtenrate die Folge ist.

RAEM

Warren Buffett spendet 37 Milliarden US$

2006-06-26T19:47:00.000+02:00

Warren Buffett ist nach Bill Gates der zweitreichste Mann der Welt. Im Alter von 75 Jahren will sich Buffett nun von einem grossen Teilen seines Vermögens trennen, das auf rd. 44 Milliarden US$ geschätzt wird. Von diesem Vermögen will Buffett 85% oder 37,4 Milliarden US$ für wohltätige Zwecke spenden, davon 31 Milliarden an die Gates Foundation. Seine Spendenabsicht hat Buffett Bill Gates und dessen Frau Melinda in einem Brief mitgeteilt.

Die Gates Foundation ist die grösste Stiftung in den USA. Im Jahr 2005 hat sie 1,36 Milliarden US$ ausgegeben. Im Vergleich dazu sind einige UN Programme klein; z.B. hatte die UNESCO im Wirtschaftsjahr 2004-05 einen Haushalt von 610 Millionen US$.

Der Haushalt des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung ist z.Z. noch etwas doppelt so gross wie die Ausgaben der Gates Foundation. Wenn das Buffett-Vermögen hinzukommt, wird die Gates Foundation mit der deutschen Entwicklungshilfeungefähr gleichziehen. Der Haushalt des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung beträgt z.Z. rd 3,9 Milliarden Euro; das entspricht rd. 4,63 Mrd US$.

Die Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation berichtet mit Audio und Video über das Ereignis.

Die New York Times hat ebenfalls einen ausführlichen Bericht. DieWashington Post kommentiert Buffets ungewöhnliche Art zu spenden ebenfalls positiv.

RAEM

Aquakultur

2006-06-18T10:57:00.000+02:00

Die New York Times vom 18/06/06 hat in ihrem Magazin unter dem Thema "Green to the Gills" einen 7-seitigen Beitrag zur Bedeutung der Aquakultur und zur den Entwicklungstendenzen dieses zunehmend wichtigen Zweigs der Lebensmittelproduktion.

Die Aquakultur, so schreibt der Autor des Beitrags, wird von einigen schon mit der Grünen Revolution verglichen:
"blue revolution" ? a boost in the productivity of the oceans that would do for the sea what the "green revolution" of the 1960's did for the land. Fish farming proponents contend that aquaculture is the only way to meet the food demands of a relentlessly growing world population, due to double in another 60 years.

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich hauptsächlich mit Aquakultursystemen für Kabeljau oder Dorsch (Cod) in Norwegen. Bei diesen Systemen wird der Fisch in Gehegen im Meer gehalten ("Fisch Farming"); das ist mit der Weidehaltung von Tieren vergleichbar.

Darüberhinaus gibt der Beitrag noch einen kleinen Eindruck von den Schwierigkeiten der USA eine Aquakultur-Politik zu entwickeln.

RAEM

Photos von Gletschern

2006-06-16T06:41:00.000+02:00

Das Abschmelzen von Gletschern wird als ein Indikator für die globale Erwärmung angesehen. Die Zeitschrift "Science" verweist in ihrer neuesten Ausgabe (Volume 312, Number 5780, Issue of 16 June 2006) auf eine Datenbank mit Photos von Gletschern. Die Photos verdeutlichen, wie stark viele Gletscher schon abgeschmolzen sind.

Science schreibt im Begleittext:
For dramatic illustrations of how much Alaska's glaciers have shrunk in the last century, take a gander at this new gallery from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. Displayed are 14 pairs of photos taken from the same locations as much as 104 years apart. For example, Muir Glacier dominated a 1941 shot of what is now Glacier Bay National Park. By 2004, the ice had dwindled into the background. Curators plan to post more photos.

Beim Herunterladen der Bilder nicht allzu ungeduldig sein; manchmal dauert es ein paar Sekunden.

RAEM
PS: Angehörige haben über die UB (siehe Link-Liste) Zugang zur digitalen Version von "Science".

Feigen früher domestiziert als Getreide

2006-06-07T20:30:00.000+02:00

Die Landwirtschaft ist offenbar 1.000 Jahre früher als bisher gedacht entstanden. Hierzu ein Auszug aus einem Artikel in der FAZ vom 07/06/06, der auf einem Beitrag in der Zeitschrift "Science" beruht.

FAZ.NET, 07/06/06
Landwirtschaft
Ist der Feigenbaum die älteste Kulturpflanze?
07. Juni 2006

Diese Stätte, nur wenige Kilometer nördlich von Jericho gelegen, ist etwa
11.300 Jahre alt. ... Forscher .. von der Bar-Ilan-Universität in Ramat-Gan stießen dort und in weiteren nahegelegenen Fundstätten auf zahlreiche Feigenfrüchte, die offenbar als Vorrat angelegt worden waren.

Wie die genaue Analyse ergab, handelt es sich vornehmlich um Früchte, die keine Samen zur Vermehrung enthielten. Sie stammen offenbar von sogenannten parthenokarpen Bäumen. Diese bilden Früchte auch ohne vorherige Bestäubung. Die heutigen Sorten der Eßfeige sind ebenfalls parthenokarp. Sie müssen vegetativ über Ableger vermehrt werden.

Die Forscher aus Israel und den Vereinigten Staaten vertreten nun in der Zeitschrift "Science" (Bd. 312, S. 1372) die Ansicht, die Funde im Jordantal seien ein Beleg dafür, daß man parthenokarpe Feigenbäume schon damals kultiviert habe. ... Daß in den Siedlungen so viele Früchte von parthenokarpen Bäumen zur Verfügung standen, lasse sich nur mit der Züchtung entsprechender Bäume erklären.

Bisher wurde allgemein angenommen, der Feigenbum sei erstmals vor etwa 6500 Jahren im Nahen Osten gezüchtet worden. Nach den neuen Erkenntnissen müßte man das Datum um 5000 Jahre vorverlegen. Die Feige wäre dann auch rund eintausend Jahre früher kultiviert worden als Getreide.

PS: Zur Zeitschrift "Science", in der der Beitrag veroeffentlicht wurde, den die FAZ zitiert, haben Angehoerige der CAU Zugang ueber die "Elektronischen Zeitschriften" der UB. Allerdings funktioniert das nur mit einen Computer, der in der CAU steht. Von zuhause aus geht das vermutlich nicht.

RAEM

The Economist rides an African beer truck - and gets a lesson in development economics

2006-06-07T12:18:00.000+02:00

Heute habe ich in der Vorlesung die Strassenräuberei durch die Polizei in einigen Teilen Afrikas erwähnt. Der "Economist" hat hierzu in seinem Weihnachtsheft des Jahres 2002 unter dem Titel "Trucking in Cameroon: The road to hell is unpaved " einen lesenswerten Beitrag geliefert.

In dem Artikel werden am Beispiel des LKW-Transports einer Ladung Guiness-Bier von Douala an der Westküste Kameruns nach Betoua im südöstlichen Regenwald des Landes die Transportprobleme in vielen Teilen Afrikas anschaulich dargestellt. Für die 500 km Strecke benötigte der LKW vier Tage. 47 Strassensperren mussten passiert werden. Ein Disput über eine angeblich fehlende Genehmigung, die schliesslich für $12 zu haben war, beanspruchte insgesamt 35h Mann-Stunden.

Ein anderer Disput über eine, von einem Polizisten frisch erfundene Regel, wurde vom Polizisten mit den Worten zu Ende gebracht: "Do you have a gun. No. I have a gun, so I know the rules." Dies ist eine schönes Beispiel, wie das Gewaltmonopol des Staates zu einem Korruptionsmonopol wird.

Der Artikel berichtet auch eine Reihe nützlicher Zahlen zu den ökonomischen Auswirkungen guter bzw. schlechter Strassen & Brücken.

Dieser Beitrag ist uneingeschränkt lesenswert.

RAEM