Global food prices are reaching unprecedented levels signalling fears about food security and the possibility of political instability. The FAO food price index is a measure of the monthly change in international prices of a basket of food commodities (cereals, oilseeds, meat and sugar) and last month hit an all time high of 231 points,
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Just to add to Katie’s last post, I have summarised some the important messages of IFAD’s findings. Titled ‘’New realities, new challenges: new opportunities for tomorrow’s generation’’, the report highlights a number of prospects and challenges facing the rural poor today. IFAD, start the report referring to the food price hikes in 2008 and the
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Following a recent blogpost by our colleagues of the Markets and Supply Chains Research,there’s a visualisation tool where all the economic indicators of agricultural production can be displayed and analysed as both charts and maps. Production for food, feed and biofuel are taken into account, as well as trade, population growth, per capita income and
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The Guardian reports that climate change could lead to substantial increases in the prices of key staples such as maize and rice. This is based on new ground breaking evidence from a report titled ‘’Food Security, Farming and Climate Change to 2050’’ by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). In the last decade the
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My whirlwind series of presentations continued in Argentina this weekend with a presentation on climate change and agriculture in Latin America to a group of agricultural economists in San Luis, Argentina.  The event is a “mini-conference” on Latin American agricultural economy, organised by the Argentinian Association of Agricultural Economists. I presented some new and emerging
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