That doesn't look like inflation

Inflation in the price of vote buying in Uganda … isn’t really inflation. The price of potassium iodide pills went up faster than any economy has ever done with the exception of Hungary in 1946 … and that’s not caused by monetary inflation either. Clever commenter “david” points out that when his local coffee shop increased the price from $0.95 to $1.05 between his purchase of two cups, the “inflation” rate was even faster.

FAO is hosting a series of workshops to help countries devise better strategies to deal with high food prices.

Sumner on learning from history

Most economists have in the back of their mind the idea that Keynes showed monetary policy was ineffective at the zero bound during the Great Depression.  How many of these economists know that by the end of 1933 (with near 25% unemployment) Keynes was complaining that FDR’s monetary policy was too inflationary.

More on monetary policy and the business cycle (K Smith via Sumner):

keep always in the front of your mind that a recession is not simply a series of unfortunate events.  A recession is when the economy produces less. For example,  the AIDS epidemic in Botswana is a horrible event for millions of people that uprooted lives and destroyed families and promises to leave a generation of orphans.

However, Botswana’s GDP growth didn’t turn negative until Lehman Brothers went under.

That a Global Financial Crisis could do what rampant death and disease could not, is an important indicator of the nature of recession.

Supporting this notion is … the history of natural disasters in Asia??

The tsunami of December 2004 and the Kashmir earthquake of October 2005 involved death and destruction on an even wider scale, yet had virtually no impact on growth rates. That was largely because the victims were mostly poor people who added little to GDP. But even the Kobe earthquake of 1995—the second-biggest ever to hit a modern urban area—had a surprisingly modest effect (see article). Within 15 months industrial production in Kobe had almost reached pre-quake levels, and Japan as a whole suffered only one quarter of declining output.

Food in Africa: Too Much and Too Little

The African Agriculture Blog warns us of two expected changes in the African food system. One is abundance and low food prices, the other is starvation and high food prices. Let's hear it for the importance of integrating African markets:

South African bumper harvest depresses Botswana cereal prices
"A three-million tonne surplus in maize from South Africa has resulted in a depression of prices" in Botswana. The prices the government uses to buy from farmers is expected to fall from P70 to P60 for a 50 kilo bag of maize, which is on the high end of what S. African farmers are receiving. Farmers who contracted with the government earlier, however, have already locked in higher prices.

Niger is on the brink of food shortages

Millions of people in Niger are at risk of running short of food, relief agencies have warned, as high prices and a lack of rain take their toll on one of the world's poorest countries. The landlocked west African nation lies at the centre of a food crisis spanning the Sahel, the arid region on the southern fringe of the Sahara.
The United Nations estimates that 7.8m people in Niger could be affected unless donors deploy some $130m (€102m, £88m) of emergency aid immediately. Parts of Mali, Burkina Faso, northern Nigeria and central Chad are also at risk. ...
Weekly admissions of malnourished children [in southern Niger] to MSF's [Doctors Without Borders'] main feeding station in Zinder doubled in the second half of April. ...
After poor rains last year, the cereal harvest was 31 per cent lower than in 2008, says the World Bank. ...
A government bulletin from mid-April found that prices for staples including millet, sorghum, maize and rice were "at an exceptionally high level", standing between 6 per cent and 17 per cent above the average of the past five years.
Compared with the same month in 2005 - when a plague of locusts contributed to food shortages - prices for millet, sorghum and maize were all higher this April, while the price of imported rice had increased by more than a third. ...
"There is enough food in the area but the prices are too high," says Johannes Schoors, Niger country director for Care, an aid agency.
During a visit to the region that included Zinder in late April, Sir John Holmes, the UN's senior emergency relief official, said that without structural changes, "it will become increasingly difficult to contain these recurrent crises, which do so much to undermine economic and social progress in the Sahel".
Sir John urged investment in irrigation and measures to prevent the encroachment of the Sahara. These steps would be more effective than periodic emergency appeals.

Governance problems are holding up aid and development flows while poor infrastructure and underdeveloped food markets and infrastructure hamper intra-regional trade in grains. (Note: the distance from Cape Town, S. Africa to Zinder, Niger is 3364 miles. That's a thousand more than from here in Ithaca, NY to my parents in Santa Barbara, CA or 100 less than the distance from here to London. It's not minor infrastructure improvements we're talking about, but it's still shorter than sending food from here to Zinder [5350 miles].)

Meanwhile, they also report that Zimbabwe's parastatal is giving 75-80% subsidies on fertilizer for winter wheat farmers. The amount farmers can buy depends on whether they sell to the parastatal marketing board or not and how large the farm is. The board is also encouraging farmers to do their banking with the board.