World Food Prize 2 - a few short summaries

Howard Buffett keynote address:

“We cannot solve other people’s problems, no matter how much we spend.”

I like technology. It is an important solution, but it is not and cannot be the only solution.

Soil is more important than seed. You cannot correct low soil fertility by piling on chemical fertilizers. Our high-tech solutions promote monocropping, which isn’t good. None of the poorest farmers have had a soil test done, so we’re guessing at what their soils need. Dead soil has no biological activity: fertilizer is like putting oxygen mask on a deadman.

Farmers are willing to take risks on seed. They buy unmarked bags and unmarked cans because they are cheaper.

Secretaries of Agriculture panel

Ghana – fertilizer subsidies and mechanization are the future.

Mozambique – 4 pillars to increasing agricultural productivity: extension, markets and information, natural resource management, and public-private partnerships. Discussed comparative advantage of different zones of Moz and the need to support farmers in their comparative advantages. We are developing new exports, like cashews.

Q: Tanz and Moz – how are you going to avoid monocropping in your focus on corridors and comparative advantages?

A Moz: We are using crop rotation. We aren’t subsidizing other crops, but we subsidize fertilizer and encourage farmers to compost as well. “But don’t worry” we’re also building a phosphate factory.

A Tanz: Don’t only grow one crop – grow other crops in the same season as well.

Sheeran (WFP)

Farmers in many poor countries reduced production during food price crisis because input prices rose faster than food prices.

Asked a market trader how he set prices. “It’s easy. I go online every morning and find the price on the Chicago markets and give a 10% discount – we are a poor nation, after all.”

Using an analogy from IT – where you use some of your computer capacity to ensure the stability of the rest – what investments and inefficiencies do we need to make/accept in order to get the rest of our food production more stable? Ex: Could WFP reduce dependence in South Sudan down the line by buying food there, even though it is more expensive than in neighboring countries?

When leaders say “not on my watch” it is powerful. It gives accountability.

LDS service in Latin America

In Seamay, Guatemala:

A retired civil engineer, Elder Curtiss supervised the construction of a water tank that helped bring water into the homes of the 2,000 villagers, who had never had running water in their homes [right]. In the meantime, he and his wife taught sanitation classes at the Church and helped begin construction on a new school that will soon have a library and a computer lab. While the Church paid for the water tank and facilitated construction of the school, the villagers did the labor themselves, which Elder Curtiss says helped them feel ownership of the changes occurring in their village.

In Brazil during an LDS national day of service, July 31:

More than 6,000 volunteers were mobilized to fight against dengue fever, a virus-based disease spread by mosquitoes, through a door-to-door education campaign. In Santa Catarina, near the Brazilian coast, volunteers gathered nearly 17 tons of food to be used by institutions for needy families.
Mormon Helping Hands volunteers also facilitated the donation of blood to local blood banks. Other projects included cleaning beaches, marshes, parks and public squares and the distribution of newborn kits for hospitals.

The LDS Africa day of service will be August 31, as we learned while meeting with the saints in Abuja. In Abuja they will be repairing a local school. I'm not yet sure what we in Yola will be doing because we only just got here.


I was also touched by this story of an LDS reporter who went to Tonga and found everything chaotic and not according to plan. She was advised that while there, many things would not go "right," but that she would find unexpected treasures that delight, comfort, and enable her to do what needed to be done.

As was evident in the Tonga airport, things in that island nation did not go as she expected they should. She did not have a telephone or Internet connection in her room. The building had no food services. The refrigerator across the hall started beeping at 3 a.m. — every night — and never stopped. And there were few road signs and no fast food restaurants in the country.
But — thanks to sweet direction from a faithful temple president — she found things far greater. Church members hung bananas outside her room. They helped her use a computer at the Church's administrative offices on the campus of the LDS high school. And they invited her into their homes for dinner.

Such a story sounds much more familiar than it did a few weeks ago.

How to recognize unfavorable labor laws

Labor laws in Brazil. One law bans paying an employee less one month than the previous month.

That many of the new jobs are formal (ie, legally registered) is despite, rather than because of, the labour laws. The trend to formalisation is largely a result of the greater availability of bank credit and equity capital on the one hand, and recent changes that make it easier to register micro-businesses on the other. …
Gustavo Gonzaga, an economist … notes that a remarkable one-third of Brazilian workers are made redundant each year, a fact he attributes in part to the labour laws themselves. These are extraordinarily rigid: they prevent bosses and workers from negotiating changes in terms and conditions, even if they are mutually agreeable. They also give workers powerful incentives to be sacked rather than resign. Generous and poorly designed severance payments cause conflict, Mr Gonzaga says, and encourage workers to move frequently. That churn affects productivity, as employers prefer not to spend on training only to see their investment walk away.

Private enterprise and capital laws in China: “behind China’s remarkable success has been an odd and often unappreciated experiment in laissez-faire capitalism.”

The right of China’s private companies to exist is by no means clear. Private companies with more than eight employees began to emerge only in 1981 and were not officially sanctioned until 1988 (the number was drawn from an essay by Karl Marx on an inflection point for the creation of a rentier class); …
No one knows quite how much private companies contribute to China’s fast-growing economy. Chinese firms fall into a bewildering variety of legal categories and their respective contributions to GDP are not reported in official statistics. …
Zhejiang’s scrappy entrepreneurs had already acquired, in the least auspicious circumstances, a culture of opportunity and a belief that anyone could become successful. The anecdotes are almost endless. … [They appear to include a healthy dose of microloans and pay day loans since the] sources [of Chinese capital] are a bit of a mystery: largely unofficial, even secretive … discerning, vibrant, and (depending on the authorities’ sentiment of the moment) even illegal. … The system is entirely informal. Records, he says, are minimal and all investments are in cash. A by-product is a proliferation of vast steel safes in homes and offices. … Although success brings praise, too much of it can invite envy and scrutiny.

And the increasingly antagonistic agricultural labor laws in the US:

This is how our relatively inexpensive food gets to us.   The costs, as the economists tell us, are externalized.  Here is one of those externalized costs–the potential of those kids to become functioning citizens in our democratic society.

A last flurry of blog links

If you wonder why there are so many links posts lately, it's because I was up all night and I find reading a less error-prone way of spending my impaired cognitive function than writing.

Beckworth argues that Keynes' "paradox of thrift" is really only an excess demand for money. There are three ways for people to save more - reduce spending and hoard cash; spend more on investments; reduce debt. That second option is directly productive and does not lead to a paradox, and the third is a transfer of resources to creditors who do not produce a paradox of thrift unless they hoard the cash. If people want to hold on to cash, this shows up as a decrease in the velocity of money. Increasing the money supply allows people to hold more cash while maintaining their spending."Another way of saying this, is that the paradox of thrift requires the Fed to be asleep on the job."

This links to a news article about a scientific paper. This sentence wittily demonstrates my approval of said satire and sparks the reader's interest in clicking. This sentence could have been deleted if I had edited more carefully, but I thought it was cute at the time.

LDS in Peru: the President expresses warm feelings

"President Garcia told us that when he was about 10-years-old his grandmother and an aunt joined the Mormon Church," said Elder Christofferson [Mormon apostle]. "His grandmother took him to meetings from time to time and he remembered, as a boy, helping with the construction of our first chapel in Lima, carrying bricks and things like that."
The Peruvian president also expressed thanks for the humanitarian work the Church has performed in his nation, including a recent project to help scores of members rebuild their homes following a massive earthquake in 2007. "He recognized the quality of citizens that the members of the Church make and said that we could count on him for any need that we might have in the country."

 Did you know that Brazil is the world's largest exporter of orange juice (85% of all traded orange juice comes from Brazil), sugar (45%), coffee (30%), beef (20%), and among the top 5 exporters of soybeans (40%), corn/maize (10%), pork (10%), and cotton (10%)?


On the lack of morphine in Africa.

How many want to come here?

Gallup reports that of the 700 some-odd million people who want to permanently emigrate, 165 million of them want to come to the US. That would be a group of people roughly equivalent to 53% of the current US population. Though far fewer people want to move to Singapore, they would see an even larger population increase by percent.

The top ten countries whose people want to move here are:

China - 23 million - 2% of them
India - 17 million - 1.5% of them
Nigeria - 17 million - 11% of them
Ethiopia - 10 million - 13% of them
Bangladesh - 8 million - 5% of them
Brazil - 8 million - 4% of them
Mexico - 6 million - 5.5% of them
Philippines - 6 million - 6.5% of them
Vietnam - 5 million - 6% of them
Japan - 3 million - 2% of them

We let in less than 0.6% that many.

Out of that 165 million, Wiki tells me that a record 1 million became naturalized US citizens in 2008, mostly from Mexico, India, and the Philippines. In 1890, 15 percent of the people living here were foreign-born. "By 1970 immigrants accounted for 4.7 percent of the US population, rising to 6.2 percent in 1980 and to an estimated 12.5 percent today."

Rotting Brains and Saving the World

It's your television, from Aid Watch

Social change from soap operas? Kenny is referring to the research of U. Chicago Professor Emily Oster joint with Robert Jensen, which found in a rigorous study that the introduction of cable TV in rural India was associated with decreased acceptability of domestic violence, decreased preference for sons over daughters, and increased school enrollment for young children. Cable TV in India features mainly game shows and soap operas.