Globalisation

This article first reviews the development of food prices in China since 2000. The authors find that despite tremendous price fluctuations in the international market in 2007–08, major staple crops (rice, wheat, and maize) in the domestic market were shielded from the volatility of the international market. This price stability can be partly attributed to Chinese government's food-security policies in stimulating grain production and smoothing domestic prices.

In the Andean region, national policy responses to the 2007–08 food-price crisis emphasised reducing pressures on consumers, and particularly on urban populations. In Bolivia, the prices of all domestic and imported food tubers and grains rose dramatically in major markets. Unexpectedly, evidence from focus groups and field research demonstrates that even in remote regions where farmers trade infrequently, smallholder farm families experienced food-price increases. Seeking to identify ‘average’ effects in such situations could also be misleading.

This article examines the case of the Mexican ‘tortilla crisis’ of 2007. Drawing on reviews of literature and the media, key-informant interviews, and secondary databases, the authors explore the response of the Mexican maize–tortilla chain to a price shock. Price increases should theoretically be passed on to the consumer as a progressively less significant percentage of the overall price of value-added food products. However, in Mexico, price increases were magnified along the maize–tortilla production chain.

This article takes the food crisis that began in 2007 as an occasion to draw attention to the deleterious impact of agricultural market volatility on poor farmers and food importing low-income countries. The article presents a menu of mechanisms that may reduce volatility or farmer and low-income country exposure to it. This is followed by a discussion of mechanisms that allow for the transfer of price risk through the use of instruments such as futures and options.

The food crisis of 2007–08 and the urban riots that ensued in some 40 developing countries placed the question of food price instability at the heart of policy debates. Since the 1980s, the prevailing idea has been that the best solution is managing risk without ‘affecting prices’ through private instruments (such as crop insurance, futures markets) in conjunction with the provision of safety nets for vulnerable populations.

The recent commodity-price boom was one of the longest and broadest of the post-World War II period, and, not unexpectedly, it reignited discussions about resource scarcity as well as proposals to ‘manage’ reminiscent of the 1970s. This contribution looks at the factors that are likely to shape commodity markets in the longer term and concludes that a stronger link between energy and non-energy commodity prices is likely to be the dominant force, especially in terms of food prices.

The food price crisis has led to assumptions that food price rises are due to inadequate food production, and that such food insecurity is linked to seed insecurity. Hence, in response to high food prices, seed resources worth hundreds of millions of US dollars are being shipped into vulnerable farming systems across the world.

Rising food prices in the late 2000s sparked protests, sometimes violent, around the globe. These public expressions of outrage were only the tip of the iceberg. Many countries have a legacy of food wars. In sub-Saharan Africa, at least 14 countries faced severe food insecurity as a result of conflict, civil strife, forced displacement, or damage from past wars. Armed violence leads to ongoing cycles of food loss which have an impact on food availability, access, and nutrition.

Hunger has been on the rise since the mid-1990s, due to a variety of factors, including a lack of policy attention and a sense of complacency generated by long-term real declines in food prices. Food prices rose sharply after 2006, and there is considerable controversy over the reasons why. Analysts have pointed to a number of factors as possible causes, including rising fuel prices, diversion of food crops into biofuels, speculation, increased meat consumption in Asia, climate change, and environmental degradation, among others.

NGOs have traditionally had little scope to bring about political reform in developing countries. This was certainly true of French development NGOs (NGDOs) operating in Cameroon during the early post-colonial decades. This situation changed in 2002 when French NGDOs, with support from the French state and Cameroonian civil society, initiated a multi-actor consultative programme (the PCPA), aiming to build democracy in Cameroon. This article traces the origins of the PCPA, assesses its achievements, and explains why the programme failed.