Best of 2011

Time for some intense naval-gazing. I wasn't going to do one of these, but then I enjoyed others' so much for the posts I missed that it seemed much more interesting.

Top Ten Posts of 2011
1. Google's statement on AUN's amazing internet usage, got a lot of doubting comments and a few  defending and very plausible explanations.
2. Nutrition Labeling, describing the new requirement that meat include information on calories from fat.
3. Unemployment: Leads and Lags - Breaking unemployment into separate decisions to hire or fire will give us a better indicator of where the economy is going (has been) than total unemployment.
4. AEA session on agricultural export bans during the 07/08 food price crisis.
5. Microinsurance in Kenya via cellphone
6. My first visit to AUN. Classes will resume Thursday the 24th
7. Low saturated fat diet vs. low simple carbohydrate diet
8. QE2 and food prices - debunking the idea that the Fed is causing global food price inflation
9. Food safety, food movements, and paternalism
10. Lit in Review: Food Demand -- Ethiopia and Speculators
Honorable Mention (because I thought it was fun): The socially acceptable price of fried chicken, also known as the political economy of fast food markets in South Korea.

Top Ten Posts of 2010 (in 2011)

1. My pictures of the Thorvaldsen's Christus and apostles statues, mentioned in a Church lesson this year.
2. Lit in Review: Grossman and Helpman, there has been steady interest in summaries and other papers that make use of the "Pay to Play" model of lobbyists.
3. Food in Africa: Too much and too little discussing the problem of getting food from food-surplus states to food-deficit states. There was never a large spike, but a steady stream of interest throughout the year.
4. High Hopes for Rwandan Agricultural Development
5. Food Security in Nepal which has been of increasing interest lately
6. Cutting Costs Through ... Fonts?? Some fonts go easier on the printer's ink
7. Population Health vs. Individual Health - commentary on macro vs. micro in economics and health
8. Ethiopian Monetary Policy - combines monetary policy, food prices, Ethiopia's development goals (food self-sufficiency), and growth prospects
8. Five from vacation: education, hyperinflation, and Chinese food safety.
10. Fed governor: if we could guarantee 5% NGDP growth, it would be great - I'm glad this made the list because I think it was my most significant post, interviewing Governor Dudley about what they are targeting and Sumner's policy.

Where did my visitors come from in 2011?

Mixed Bag: good and bad in African agriculture

In the most distressing news I've heard recently put in a positive light, 20 Tanzanian farmers were invited to Uganda to learn more about using human feces as fertilizer. They would like to convince us that this is a good thing because fertilizer use is so low, but it's also a great way for spreading diseases. Their numbers are 20 years old, but show that a lot more fertilizer is supposedly distributed than was ever spread on crops. That doesn't suggest the problem was lack of fertilizer availability.

Flooding in northwestern Nigeria (Sokoto state, pictured) destroyed 1 billion Naira worth of crops ($6.7 million).

In much happier news, ICRISAT has been providing some Mali farmers with groundnut (peanut) seeds that take only 3 months to harvest instead of 4. As rain patterns have shifted, assumedly due to climate change, the rainy season has been getting shorter and shorter. If I understand the report correctly, it claims that groundnut production has also increased 10-fold.

They also established a cooperative (starting at 20 members, now 65) to coordinate storage. Each member of the cooperative contributes 20 kg of groundnuts for storage. 10 of them they get back later in the year (as a form of forced storage for behavioral economics reasons) and the other 10 are sold (for about $320) to give the cooperative a source of loanable capital.

Ugandan rice production is up significantly - 66% during the last decade. Instead of importing rice, they now export to South Sudan, Kenya, and DRC. The article credits Nerica (New Rice for Africa) with much of the growth. I take the article to be saying that a new survey by the Ministry of Agriculture claims that rice exports are now valued more than any other traditional food export.

Zimbabwe is going to start handing out agricultural input vouchers to vulnerable farmers this week, entitling them to "10 kilograms of maize seed, one 50-kilogram bag of compound D and one 50 kilogram bag of ammonium nitrate fertilizer."

The opportunity costs of cheap food

Our food costs more than the price at the grocery store. In addition to the environmental costs, M. Nestle worries about food safety costs that would be much cheaper to prevent than cure. While the argument made by companies and Nestle is that prevention shows up in consumer costs while clean up doesn’t, I would argue that private clean up does show up in consumer costs. It’s only when government and public health systems bear the costs that they don’t show up directly in food costs. She worries also about human costs, including obesity caused in part by cheap, subsidized calories and expensive, unsubsidized vegetables, and:

I was reminded of externalized food costs when reading about the remarkable efforts of a Salinas teacher to educate children of itinerant farmworkers. The kids are trying to learn under disrupted, impoverished, crowded living conditions. If their parents were paid and housed better, we would pay more for food. …
The CEO of a large U.S. meat company told me that if he raised wages by $3, he could hire locals and not have to deal with immigrant labor. But then he would have to raise the price of his meat by 3 cents per pound (I’m not kidding). That amount, he claimed, would price him out of competitiveness. …

Speaking of which, Florida tomato pickers (mostly immigrants) have recently been awarded a much better contract, including higher wages, being informed about their legal labor rights, and many are cheering that the industry is really beginning to turn around. Expect some of the hidden costs of tomatoes to be less hidden.

In support of this notion of the unseen costs of our food system, Batz and colleagues at the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute identify the 10 pathogen-food combinations that cost us the most in terms of public health (medical care, lost productivity, chronic disabilities including permanent physical and mental damage to infants, etc.):

Campylobacter in poultry — costs $1.3 billion a year [sickens more than 600,000 Americans annually]
Toxoplasma in pork — costs $1.2 billion a year
Listeria in deli meats — costs $1.1 billion a year
Salmonella in poultry — costs $700 million a year
Listeria in dairy products — costs $700 million a year
Salmonella in complex foods — costs $600 million a year
Norovirus in complex foods — costs $900 million a year
Salmonella in produce — costs $500 million a year
Toxoplasma in beef — costs $700 million a year
Salmonella in eggs — costs $400 million a year

Another source Nestle misses is the taxes needed to pay for government food policies in the form of taxation.

An example of unusual environmental costs of a food system comes from Zimbabwe, whose justice department has decided to solve undernutrition in overcrowded prisons by adding elephant meat to the menu. The government’s position is that there are three times as many elephants as conservation groups think, so they have “an elephant overpopulation crisis.”

Big Bag of Food: food safety, food movements, and paternalism

Levistky, a Cornell nutrition professor, discusses the drawbacks of high-protein, low-fat,low-carb diets (basically: they don’t work). On the other hand, the Cornell dieticians  I have worked with highly recommend a high-protein, low-fat, low-carb diet. The main problem they find is that most people really eat a high-fat diet when they shoot for high-protein. M. Nestle, on the other hand, thinks we all eat too much protein already and that somehow the advice nutritionists have given us for the last 50 years can remain unchanged. Yeah, it’s still a mess.


Of course, then you have the problem that a study found “nearly half of supermarket meat and poultry samples to be contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus,” and that half of that was resistant to antibiotics. Though M. Nestle appropriately ridicules the meat industry for passing the buck to consumers, the industry is factually correct that proper cooking procedures remove the threat.  So cook your meat thoroughly because the industry isn’t making major moves to improve food safety or revise its antibiotic policies.

M. Nestle comes out in favor of the plan to ban SNAP recipients from using the money to purchase sugared soda. Originally she was against the idea just because it seems rather patronizing and patriarchal and other words that evoke controlling male figures. The two turning points for her were the growing body of evidence (quite literally) that liquid sugars account for the bulk of increasing obesity rates among the poorest and realizing that if there is no objection to the WIC program – that provides benefits only for very specific, politically favored commodities – this is less a radical change in personal freedom and more a shift from traditional food aid to a more WIC-like program. If we don’t complain about WIC being an infringement on people’s freedom, why complain about this one?

Another Cornell prof, Wansink, had people try Cheetos without the yellow food coloring (which almost look like the red-white-and-blue mock-Cheetos below). It affected the objective taste in no way,  but had a profound impact on people’s enjoyment and sense of taste: It no longer tasted like cheese!

Indeed, color often defines flavor in taste tests. When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding. Color creates a psychological expectation for a certain flavor that is often impossible to dislodge, Dr. Shelke said. ...

As yet, natural colorings have not proven to be a good alternative. They are generally not as bright, cheap or stable as artificial colorings, which can remain vibrant for years. Natural colorings often fade within days.

M. Nestle also celebrates the “food movement” – which to me are multiple, quite different movements that just haven’t fractured yet – going mainstream. The most surprising thing to her was that the head of USDA actually seems to have an intelligent, informed opinion. Who'd've guessed? My snark aside, she said:

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack came, gave thoughtful remarks, and responded with equally thoughtful answers to not-always-friendly comments from the audience.  This was the first time I’d seem him in person and I was impressed by how carefully he has thought through the issues he has to deal with.   Even when I viewed the issues differently,  it seemed clear that his were the result of much intelligent thought and weighing of alternatives.

Willingness to Pay: Livestock

Awono, Dupraz, and Vermersch, (2011) “Consumer willingness to pay for attributes of west-African poultry: using the microeconomics of implicit price,” GREDI Working Paper 11-01.

By west-African they mean Cameroon. They estimate a hedonic function to get at consumers’ willingness to pay for each attribute. They find that the most important attributes are low cost, being sold in separate parts, and distance to find it (the further the distance, the greater the desire for separate, ready-to-cook parts). This gives frozen chicken – imported from Europe or Brazil – a decided advantage over local “wet” market chicken grown locally. Attributes that were not significant included: taste, product quality, household size or occupation, or education. Imported chickens are blamed with putting many local poultry farmers out of business. The main item in favor of local chicken is that you can haggle over prices.

That apparently is not so much the case in China: “They insist on having the animal killed in front of them so they can guarantee it’s fresh. They need to see the gleam in the animal’s eye so they know the merchant is not cheating them.” Oh, the importance of a marketplace based on trust and enforced quality standards!

Among desirable attributes for meat in general is a certain degree of safety. Food safety is significantly increased by cooking your meat thoroughly. One article claims that we have gotten much better at getting rid of pathogens and contaminants in our pork supply chain, so we ought to be able to cook pork at lower temperatures while maintaining adequate safety, as we do with better cuts of beef. But the culture is so accustomed to only well-done pork that there is little call for recipes with medium-done pork.

Behavioral economics has some interesting things to say about willingness to pay in development contexts. Glennerster and Kremer present a handful of interesting conclusions, based largely on RCTs. For one thing, conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are more effective than we think … and often on “control” groups: Malawi varied up the amount of the conditional cash transfer and even the smallest amount was enough to get the average effect, families in Mexico and Columbia who are near the cutoff for receiving the CCT are also more likely to send their children to school without receiving a penny themselves, scholarships for the best-performing girls in Kenya also induced greater effort from boys. Despite all this wonderfulness, the most cost-effective way of getting more students into school was providing information (in Madagascar) while CCTs in Mexico were the least effective. They have similar fun with health research on intervention uptake. Small incentives matter for individual behavior.

Headlines that say it all: Food Safety

USDA trying to match safety standards of Wal-Mart – not there yet

An International Recipe

Pork and Beef from NotCanada: Canada has been so kind as to regularly invite the neighbors over for a good old fashioned meat inspection. It saves time and transaction costs to have US inspectors give an opinion or two on Canadian meat products, many of which are subsequently sold south. Normally the inspectors find some problems at a few individual plants and make some friendly recommendations. This time around, the problems they found were far more systematic, the government had failed to follow up on problems noted in the last inspection, the government had also failed to follow its own manuals at plant level, and 6 of Maple Leaf's plants (Canada's largest meatpacker) were either banned from shipping to the US or served notice that they would be banned if they didn't clean up at once.

Quinoa from Bolivia: Once pushed aside by Spaniards in favor of wheat,quinoa's rising popularity among foodies has increased its price seven fold since 2000 even as production increased tenfold. The increasing price, however, has led farmers to export the vast majority of their crop and instead eat rice and beans, lowering the families' nutritional wellbeing. Bolivia and Peru produce 97% of the world's quinoa. Farmers say it is not lifting them out of poverty, but they are living better.

President Evo Morales' government has deemed quinoa a "strategic" foodstuff, essential to this poverty-afflicted nation's food security. It is promoting the grain and has included quinoa in a subsidized food parcel for pregnant women....

Quinoa (pronounced KEEN-wah) provides 10 essential amino acids, is loaded with minerals and has a high protein content — between 14 and 18 percent. The FAO (U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization) says it is so nutritious it can be substituted for mother's milk.

"This food is about the most perfect you can find for human diets," said Duane Johnson, a 61-year-old former Colorado State agronomist who helped introduce it to the United States three decades ago.

Quinoa isn't a cereal. It's a seed that is eaten like a grain, but is gluten-free and more easily digestible than corn, wheat, rye, millet and sorghum. And it can be substituted for rice in just about anything — from soup to salad to pudding to bread.

Onions from India: A delightful article on the political economy of very particular foods and the importance of keeping the urban middle-class happy, rather than farmers.

You might find it hard to believe, but high prices of onions can trigger the fall of the government in India. In 1998, a supply side shock led to a sharp increase in onion prices in the country and most notably, in the state of Delhi. In the following elections, the ruling party was routed in large part due to its failure to control the price of onions in the capital state. Today, onion prices in India are up again, rising by over 100% in just three weeks in December [and the government has responded in short order.]

Commenters complain, however, that onions are in fact a staple and affect the welfare of the poor greatly. (Eg.: "For many poor people in the villages Onion is the only item eaten with bread.")

Beans from Malawi?: Scientists are arguing that the Malawi government should encourage farmers to plant beans (pigeon pea, actually) with their maize to reduce the cost of Malawi's fertilizer subsidies. Pigeon pea fertilizes the ground so fertilizer costs are cut in half, improves the productivity of the synethetic fertilizers that are used, and stabilize and increase production. Currently the talk is of complementing fertilizer rather than removing them.

Yes, We Know Fast Food is Bad for Us

I've mentioned the San Fransisco law to ban toys in fast food before. The Daily Show did a great job with it.
Best moment: interviewing one of the law's proponents who admitted that the city does not have the authority to order a private company (e.g. Netflix) to change its business practices ... when that's exactly what they are doing to private companies. The fellow goes speechless for a second. Classic. Video below the fold.

Also (pictured) how to find real food at the supermarket a la M. Nestle.

Pictures that show the difference between the way food looks when advertised and when you actually buy it.

How to check to make sure your pizza is salmonella free.

Newmark presents one of the more interesting predictions for the future:

The U.K.'s Guardian assembles some experts to predict. Some are plausible; some are not. This one, from an executive at Ogilvy and Mather, made me laugh:

In 25 years, I bet there'll be many products we'll be allowed to buy but not see advertised – the things the government will decide we shouldn't be consuming because of their impact on healthcare costs or the environment but that they can't muster the political will to ban outright. So, we'll end up with all sorts of products in plain packaging with the product name in a generic typeface – as the government is currently discussing for cigarettes.

(The man knows how government works.)

And while we're at it, some tongue in cheek celebrations of farmers' markets (also below the fold)

Big Bag o Blog Links to start the new year

China in Africa meets Micro-livestock: a new research program is introducing Chinese weaver ants to African fruit trees to combat pests. The researchers note that if this works, it is: green and organic, another source of income and jobs (rearing ants to sell farmers), and a viable protein source for people who don't mind eating ants.

Half of a charter city: Dijbouti, Ethiopia. The charter city part comes at the end of a lengthy musing on Ethiopian political history, wondering why democracy has taken so little hold.

A policy entrepreneur in India is using Facebook to increasing citizen access to government (ie - complain here) and improve information sharing between government sectors.

GMOs meet Florida orange juice to prevent an insect-borne bacteria which causes "greening" that wipes out the crop and the tree. "Most scientists who have studied the problem seem to agree that genetic modification, and the cultivation of trees resistant to the bacteria that causes "greening" disease, currently hold out the only real long-term hope of fighting it." That was the conclusion of a report sponsored by the Florida Department of Citrus and U.S. National Academy of Sciences

Obama is signing the food safety bill today ... but where will the money come from?

A defense of large incomes for people in finance: "As long as we have an economy that is increasingly dominated by “idea companies,” where the idea is really, really hard to discover and really easy to implement once discovered, finance will earn huge gains." (Response to the responses)

On the gains from having a single currency in the US. To Libertarians, this is called the transaction cost side of private currency creation.

Education spending and minorities: it's easier/more cost-effective to educate a homogeneous population. Tino shows that once you remove immigrant populations from the analysis, the relationship between education spending and outcomes is large and positive. It only looks like additional spending worsens or has no effect on outcomes in the full sample because it's much more expensive to educate more diverse groups, who have lower outcomes for a variety of reasons. Within minority groups too, there is evidence of the same positive effect. The 0-effect sometimes observed is an artifact of lumping groups together.

Which shipping company is best for your package? Depends on the type of package. USPS is gentlest with packages but worst with Express Mail. All carriers were less careful with Fragile boxes.

Five from vacation: education, hyperinflation, and Chinese food safety

I've been taking my Christmas vacation early this year, and since my son hasn't woken up yet I got to do a little econ reading this morning. That sentence belongs under the heading "You know you picked the right profession when...".

Today we're talking about education

Recent research (Hanushek via Mankiw) shows:  

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.

Tino demonstrates that the PISA data really aren't that negative on Americans because it includes immigrant workers. If you compare European-descent students in Europe to European-descent in the US, the students in the US score higher. If you compare Asian-descent students in Asia to Asian-descent in the US, they score just as well. The issue is that we have a lot more immigrants, we filter out for high-skilled workers less, and he claims it's otherwise unfair to compare a city with a large and diverse nation.

In other news, Mankiw shows us how to do menu costs during hyperinflaiton (write them in chalk so you can update the price during the course of the day), Cowen asks why we need price controls if the point of health care legislation was to bring costs down, and Powell reports that the Chinese food safety system puts the onus of accountability on the regulators who can be sentences to ten years in prison if people are harmed through their negligence.

A Thanksgiving Reminder

In the words of Dave Barry (2004):

But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a ticking Meat Bomb of Death."

Please be sure to cook your Thanksgiving dinner thoroughly. The USDA's actual quote is that means 165 degrees measured with a meat thermometer.

Food safety website Barfblog's recommendations: avoid Whole Foods turkey "For the past couple of weeks, Whole Foods has been pushing their turkeys like some form of food porn crack..." Chapman and Powell's advice for a safe Thanksgiving turkey here. The thing we are going to be most pressed to accomplish: "Refrigerate leftover turkey within 2 hours of taking it out of the oven."

The African Food System

The African Food System and Its Interaction with Human Health and Nutrition is a collaborative, multi-disciplinary research effort between researchers at Cornell University, United Nations University, and other eminent scholars and policymakers worldwide under the direction of Per Pinstrup-Andersen. It is the first in a series discussing the gaps in knowledge that prevent governments in Sub-Saharan Africa from accomplishing the Millennium Development Goals. The research is targeted at a broad audience and does not assume specific technical knowledge to make use of the insights from the chapters.

Topics include: economics; nutrition; politics; poverty traps; malaria; AIDS; livestock; environment; food aid; population; gender studies


I am very happy to see the book come out as it is my first publication (I am the lead author on chapter 2 on nutrition). There will be a book launching event November 23 at Cornell University G10 Biotech Building from 4:30-6:30pm. There will be short presentations by those authors who can make it followed by a reception and book signing.


The chapters are as follows:

Spin vs. Science: McDonald's Burgers

The internet has been reminding us regularly of late that small, plain McDonald's burgers don't rot if you leave them out. The standard conclusions people draw from this are obvious. Lopez-Alt decided to test that hypothesis by comparing the (lack of) decomposition of a McD's burger with a home-ground burger using 9 different samples and trials. The costs of science included sleeping on the sofa for over two weeks after debating the wisdom of this particular trial

The results are in and a home-ground burger of the same size also doesn't rot.
If you leave out the salt, it still doesn't rot.
If you make it bigger, then it rots.

The issue is that when the burger is small enough, the moisture evaporates from it before the mold has a chance to grow. Quarter pounders, whether home-ground or McDonald's style, do rot. And if you put the smaller burger in a sealable plastic bag so that the moisture can't escape ... it rots.

So stop picking on the poor, helpless multi-billion dollar corporation, or at least stick to scientifically accurate outrage. McDonald's deserves a break today.

The Lighter Side: Food Safety and Ethics

Defining food safety in alternate ways

Food safety meets Department of Defense

F 

Um, Dr. Mel, I don't think that's what is meant by "functional foods." To be fair, Big Food is a bit confused too.

When foodie children trade lunch

Voluntary Food Safety Measures

Parsons at Change.org is concerned that third-party food safety auditors have the wrong incentives. They are paid by the companies they are investigating and so have every incentive to continue giving good reviews in order to continue getting their business. She points out two bad examples about the same auditor:

The Peanut Corporation of America hired third-party auditor AIB International last year. The auditor awarded the Texas plant with a "superior" rating — those peanuts then went on to sicken more than 600 people with salmonella poisoning. The same company also gave a "superior" rating to Wright County Egg, one of two egg producers fingered for America's most recent salmonella outbreak, which sickened more than 1,500 people and resulted in the recall of a half-billion eggs. I guess auditors missed all the maggots, mice, and manure (although to be fair, ABI says it was only hired to check Wright County Egg's packing and processing plants, not the production site itself).

Parsons' answer is to get the FDA to do the inspections and encourages people to write Sen. Coburn to urge him to stop blocking the measure that would give FDA that authority.
 
Powell at barfblog, however, favorably quotes WalMart's vice president of food safety on not just having processes but understanding that food safety is about individual behavioral choices that needs to be incorporated into the process. Changing the auditor by itself won't solve the underlying problems - at best it can catch problems sooner. After all, government inspectors were very well aware of problems at Wright County Egg but did nothing.

Preparing the Way: GM Salmon

More than half of the GMO battle has been about perceptions, and in particular ethical perceptions. Are the companies performing this research doing it ethically? Their biggest PR mistake has been to dismiss customers' and NGOs' concerns about food safety, environmental impact, and the other issues. Wilde argues therefore that in order to give genetically modified salmon the best chance for acceptance, even GMO proponents should give recent criticisms due weight and deliberation.

Run some more tests and make it obvious that the companies are acting ethically with the best interests of the public at heart. Wilde cites the testimony of one GM opponent in particular for being reasonable and clear about what standards would need to be met, at a cost of putting off release for 1-2 years for additional food safety tests rather than 10. Doing further studies as a sign of good faith would make it much easier not only for the product but all future GM livestock and organisms.

Chicken and Egg problems

A picture that has been making the rounds depicts "Mechanically Separated Chicken." The "recipes" vary. This is not the entire chicken, bones and all. This is everything off the bones, including the less-appetizing portions. USDA ruled that we can't do this to beef anymore because of risks of Mad Cow disease. After you add some flavorings and artificial colors, it tastes like chicken again and finds its way into hot dogs, chicken nuggets, and anywhere else Indistinguishable Meat Products are sold. Update: Some fact-checking via Snopes.

Two other pieces remind us that the easy labels don't tell us everything: Organic eggs do not mean happy chickens or clean, safe food; and large egg factories do not mean unsafe food. In fact, some 80% of organic eggs are grown factory style with chicken in cages and sometimes very unsanitary conditions. But no artificial ingredients are used and there are "openings" to let nature into the henhouse, so they get around the regulations.

Change.org may lament this, and that's why the second link is also needed. Powell at Barfblog highlights a NY Times article on an Indiana egg rancher who produces over 800k eggs every day and has never once tested positive for salmonella.

Big ag doesn’t mean bad ag. Organic or conventional, local or global, big or small, there are good farmers and bad farmers. The good ones know all about food safety and continuously work to minimize levels of risk.

Interestingly enough, one of the difficulties of more strictly organic production with free-range chickens is that it's a lot harder to keep them away from flies or rats that might contaminate them with salmonella.

Update: A video showing how this pink stuff is made and turned into chicken nuggets below the fold.

Alternate estimates of the hungry

While Easterly expresses his concerns over the FAO's pronouncements on the number of hungry people in the world, Gallup polling broadly supports the FAO's estimates. Telephone interviews asked 1,000 or more households in 113 countries if they had had difficulty purchasing food in 2009. In the median country, 26% of respondents answered in the affirmative. Gallup does the math and estimates approximately 1 billion people suffered from food insecurity at some point in 2008/2009. They also report the change in a number of high-hunger countries (right). The largest improvements have been in Uganda, Burundi, and Zimbabwe; the worst changes in Ecuador, the Philippines, and Cameroon.

In other hunger news, Nucifora at the World Bank shows that while Mozambique's reinstated food subsidies may quell the food riots there, most of the benefits are being captured by the wealthiest quintile. Apparently, monetary policy has had a huge effect here as well, with food prices following appreciations and depreciations in the last few years.

An FAO subcommittee has released a new aquaculture certification program:

BIG Bag o Foodie Links

Water

Libya's Great Man-Made River nears completion at $20 billion and 2,333 miles long to connect the 5% of the country with rain to the rest.

What makes water projects work? Social capital, says IFPRI. Water and sanitation committees (cleverly known as WATSANs) in Ghana are not only more likely where communities have other social groups and less likely where communities are ethnically divided, they seem to improve payment for water services and improve water safety. Female leaders seem particularly important.

Food Safety
Powell gives NY Times reporter Bittman's new book two thumbs down for terrible food safety advice: "This is food safety idiocracy. Any food safety advice in Bittman’s book should be disregarded as fantasy."

Powell also found something worse than e. coli and salmonella:a metal staple in his pretzel-filled M&M. "I would rather take my chances with Salmonella or E. coli that I know I can cook to death rather than bleeding internally to death."  Update: Contrition from Mars goes a long way.

Foodie Faddies
Ben and Jerry's has surrendered. They're taking the "All Natural" label off their ice cream because a number of the ingredients are heavily processed (high fructo... I mean, corn sugar, highly processed? you don't say...)

And speaking of corporations, Wilde lets us know that corporate heads are either deluded or lying when they claim that "Personally, I would like to serve a healthier product.  But, if these efforts threaten profitability, I risk getting sued by stakeholders.  Corporations are obliged to pursue maximum profits and no other goal." A recent study of actual court cases says this is not the case.

If one can argue with a straight face that selling healthier food enhances the reputation and long-term prospects of the company, I think that would count as a reasonable business judgment.

Wilde's best line: "Markets are a great game, but a dreadful religion."

Powell urges us to buy local while avoiding "locavore nonsense" by quoting Doering:

buying local makes a good deal of sense when the natural conditions support the seasonal production of good, fresh local food. Who wouldn’t buy our local asparagus in June and fresh sweet corn and tomatoes in August? ...  What is new is the pretentious elevation of this simple idea by the chattering culinary class to the status of a comprehensive creed, which, they assert, can make a major contribution to a more sustainable food system.

I was in a very chic restaurant in Tucson, Ariz. where the smug chef righteously proclaimed that all his ingredients were locally grown. He was quite offended when I asked him about the environmental and other costs of importing all that fresh water to grow that food in the Arizona desert. And how is it more sustainable to deny developing countries the opportunity to export their tropical fruits and vegetables?

And five programs to improve school lunches:

• Salad bars
• Healthy vending machines (Cornell nutrition and agricultural economics students occasionally foment for that when gradual changes move the vending machines back to less healthy choices.)
• Chefs joining the staff or advising kids on healthy eating and food prep
  
• School gardens (not without controversy)
• Buying food from local farmers

Potpourri
Breakfast in Iraq: "At first this weekend I was jealous of my friends in DC enjoying DC brunches.  Then we went to a local hole-in-the-wall and I saw breakfast. ...  After that, I was basically jealous of myself, because the food was so good." 

Tyson is facing a suit for gender discrimination which could jeopardize millions in government contracts if a) it is proved true and b) they don't give 750 female workers backpay and roughly 100 more female applicants jobs. That could cause a significant market power shift. Change.org naturally assumes guilty before proven innocent.

And the FAO is touting small-holder dairy farms. There are presently over 750 million people engaged in it, with an average of two cows. The most interesting and unexpected problem they bring up is environmental: "Low-yield dairy systems in Africa and South Asia are estimated to have higher carbon footprints per 100 kilogram of milk produced than high-yield systems in the United States and Western Europe."

Snark of the Day: Egg Safety

M. Nestle reposts the egg industry's response to the current salmonella problems and her translation of them in red italics.

A message from America’s Egg Farmers. We want you to think that we are down home farmers of small flocks of hens in a lovely bucolic settings. We think this sounds better than “A message from egg agribusiness.”
You’ve probably heard about the recent egg recall. We wish you hadn’t.
As egg farmers, we’re concerned, and continue to work closely with the FDA and USDA to help ensure the safest and highest quality eggs possible. We don’t have to take any responsibility for this mess. We will let the FDA and USDA deal it.
The potentially affected eggs, which make up less than 1% of all US eggs, have been removed from store shelves. Whew.  The problem is solved. We don’t need to do another thing except work on public relations.

You may be wondering if eggs are safe to eat. We wish you would just forget about this.
Yes, they are.  Fingers crossed!
Thoroughly cooked eggs are thoroughly safe eggs, according to the Center for Disease control and the FDA. Eggs should be cooked until the whites and yolks are firm. We know we are producing unsafe eggs.  It’s not our fault if you don’t know how to cook them.
To find out more information on this recall and the safe handling of eggs, please visit eggsafety.org. When you do, we will tell you how safe our eggs are and how well we treat our hens, and invite you to watch an FDA video on how to cook eggs properly.

And remember, thoroughly cooked means thoroughly safe. It’s not our fault if you don’t listen.