monkey's uncle

The FAO Food Price Index (FPI) remains at near record-highs, and this at a time when record droughts and calamitous famine threaten the Horn of Africa. Using the latest data from the FAO FPI page, I plot here the FPI time series from 1990-2011. World food prices are high and have remained so since the [...]

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I’ve spent the better part of the day editing web pages as I prepare to teach two courses this spring. Given that I’ve more-or-less wasted the day with necessary but not especially intellectually rewarding tasks, I thought that I would take a moment to post something really important and scientifically interesting. Jennifer Burney, of Stanford’s [...]

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Information on our NICHD-funded April formal demography workshop on migration and adaptation is now posted on the website Stanford Center for Population Research (SCPR, pronounced ”scooper”).  SCPR is itself hosted by Stanford’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRiSS), which is also the umbrella organization for the Methods of Analysis Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS), a [...]

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Newly released data by FAO show that food prices continued to rise, up 3.4% from the last month of 2010. This is yet another record high. Here is a plot based on the FAO data (click to enlarge): An article in today’s New York Times attributes much of the rise in price to uncertainty over [...]

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The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization‘s food price index is at an all-time high, meaning that the food security of millions of people is in jeopardy. In the plot below (click to enlarge), we can see that the FPI currently just exceeds its previous high in June of 2008, when riots over food shortages were [...]

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A mutant strain of the wheat stem rust fungus, Puccinia graminis f. sp. tritici, has emerged that threatens as much as 60 million tons of world wheat production.  The story of this emergence can be found here.  There is a clearinghouse of information on the Borlaug Global Rust Initiative website. The emergence of such a [...]

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Craig Hadley drew my attention to this terrific piece by Paul Roberts on the complexities of truly sustainable agriculture.  Food for though, as it were…

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An opinion piece in the IHT this morning raises the important point that stepped up biofuel production may tax already strained world fresh water supplies.  Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, chairman and former chief executive of Nestlé, suggests that if world biofuel production targets are met, water withdrawals for agriculture can increase by as much as one-third.  Brabeck-Letmathe writes, Seventy percent of all [...]

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There is a new Rice Outlook report from the Economic Research Service of the USDA.  I was surprised to see a forecast record harvest for the coming year, given the crazy price movements in rice this year and the dire predictions that were the rule earlier this summer.  At Costco in California, they actually rationed [...]

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OK, I understand that agricultural diseases are devastating for both the farmers and people who rely on their produce to subsist, particularly in a world where food prices have increased dramatically in part due to agricultural losses from plant pathogens.  I just can’t help but find the names of many agricultural diseases amusing.  The one [...]

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