Time 100: The World's Most Influential People

The Time magazine has a list of world's 100 most influential people. I was expecting some economists on the list but found just one: Ben Bernanke. Or am I missing something?

Leaders & Revolutionaries

• Dalai Lama
• Vladimir Putin
• Barack Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• John McCain
• Hu Jintao
• George W. Bush
• Jacob Zuma
• Anwar Ibrahim
• Kevin Rudd
• Bartholomew I
• Ben Bernanke
• Muqtada al-Sadr
• Robert Gates
• Michelle Bachelet
• Sonia Gandhi
• Baitullah Mehsud
• Evo Morales
• Ma Ying-jeou
• Ashfaq Kayani

Heroes & Pioneers

• Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie
• Oprah Winfrey
• Oscar Pistorius
• Mia Farrow
• Andre Agassi
• Lance Armstrong
• Bob and Suzanne Wright
• Peter Gabriel
• Kaká
• Sheik Mohammed al-Maktoum
• Yoani Sánchez
• Madeeha Hasan Odhaib
• Randy Pausch
• Lorena Ochoa
• Tony Blair
• Alexis Sinduhije
• Aung San Suu Kyi
• George Mitchell

Scientists & Thinkers

• Michael Bloomberg
• Craig Venter
• Jill Bolte Taylor
• Larry Brilliant
• Jeff Han
• Mehmet Oz
• Nancy Brinker
• Harold McGee
• Peter Pronovost
• Eric Chivian & Richard Cizik
• Mary Lou Jepsen
• Paul Allen
• Nicholas Schiff
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Wendy Kopp
• Shinya Yamanaka & James Thomson
• Michael Griffin
• Susan Solomon
• Isaac Berzin

Artists & Entertainers

• Lorne Michaels
• Miley Cyrus
• Robert Downey Jr.
• Herbie Hancock
• Joel & Ethan Coen
• Bruce Springsteen
• Peter Gelb
• Mariah Carey
• Khaled Hosseini
• Elizabeth Gilbert
• Rem Koolhaas
• Judd Apatow
• Alex Rigopulos & Eran Egozy
• George Clooney
• Tim Russert
• Suze Orman
• Stephenie Meyer
• Tyler Perry
• Tom Stoppard
• Chris Rock
• Takashi Murakami

Builders & Titans

• Indra Nooyi
• Ali al-Naimi
• Rupert Murdoch
• Steve Jobs
• Radiohead
• John Chambers
• Jeff Bezos
• Jay Adelson
• Steve Ballmer
• Jamie Dimon
• Prince Alwaleed bin Talal
• Lou Jiwei
• Neelie Kroes
• Jeffrey Immelt
• Karl Lagerfeld
• Lloyd Blankfein
• Carlos Slim
• Mo Ibrahim
• Ratan Tata
• Cynthia Carroll
• Carine Roitfeld
• Michael Arrington

Food Crisis and South Asia

The World Bank's South Asia section has a nice analysis of the impact of rising food prices in South Asia, where at least 75% of the population live in rural areas and 60% of the labor force depend on agriculture. Crop yields have declined from 2.1 percent a year between 1950 and 1990 and to 1.2 percent after 1990. The WB believes that technology has the answer to slacking yield in the region.

"Organizing and providing economy of scale to small producers will significantly reduce the cost of doing business in rural areas and facilitate their integration into value chains. This will transform small farmers into an attractive market with greater bargaining power in dealing with the public and the private sector," said Brizzi. While these investments will not affect food prices in the short term, they can help to achieve food security in the future.

...Brizzi attributed the increase in the world food prices to raising standards of living in countries like China and India, increased use of food crops for bio-fuels, and increased oil and fertilizer prices. The major grain exporting countries such as Australia has experienced a substantial drop in its production due to weather-related shortages. Increasing demand for meat and protein diet, which requires more input than cereals, in the developing countries have added a new dimension to this phenomena. Also the high international oil price has accounted for increased fertilizer and transportation costs. More analysis is required to determine the impact of these changes on world food prices.

...Brazil currently does not provide subsidy support to the bio-fuel industry. Brizzi, however, warned that Brazil success story will not necessarily apply to South Asia. He pointed out that sugarcane is a water-intensive crop and in Brazil it is largely rain-fed in contrast India, which is mostly based on irrigation. The feasibility of producing fuels with other crops still needs validation in South Asia.

Btw, Will Martin and Marcos Ivanic from the WB has a nice, interesting, and revealing paper about the impact of rising food prices on poverty. The paper is titled "Implications of higher global food prices for poverty in low-income countries."

Summary:

In many poor countries, the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor, while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse, but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects, and can only be determined by looking at real-world data. Results using household data for ten observations on nine low-income countries show that the short-run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country, but, that poverty increases are much more frequent, and larger, than poverty reductions. The recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially.

Food Crisis: Clipping, Scrimping, Saving

And this is the fifth article on the Washington Post series on global food crisis.

Clipping, Scrimping, Saving

...Since March 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of eggs has jumped 35 percent. A gallon of milk is up 23 percent. A loaf of white bread has climbed 16 percent. And a pound of ground chuck is up 8 percent. Overall, U.S. food prices in 2008 are expected to rise 4 to 5 percent, about double the increases of recent years. And while the total rise is far less drastic than elsewhere around the world, the sharp hike for staples means everyone is feeling the pinch.

...In March, Nielsen reported that the annual number of shopping trips per household had dropped 9 percent, from 181 in 2001 to 164 in 2007.

...Case in point: Poli Marinova, a Bethesda marketing communications manager, said she has cut her grocery bills by almost 30 percent without switching to conventional foods. Instead, she skips "luxury items" like sushi and prepared sandwiches and soups. "We're buying a lot less overall at Whole Foods. We used to buy juice, biscuits and baby food from there," she said. "Now, we get a lot of that stuff at Costco or the Giant so we can afford to keep buying organic."

Food Crisis: Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Cars

This is a fourth series form the Washington Post articles on food crisis.

Siphoning Off Corn to Fuel Our Cars

...Across the country, ethanol plants are swallowing more and more of the nation's corn crop. This year, about a quarter of U.S. corn will go to feeding ethanol plants instead of poultry or livestock.

...Rising food prices have given Congress and the White House a sudden case of legislative indigestion. In 2005, the Republican-led Congress and President Bush backed a bill that required widespread ethanol use in motor fuels. Just four months ago, the Democratic-led Congress passed and Bush signed energy legislation that boosted the mandate for minimum corn-based ethanol use to 15 billion gallons, about 10 percent of motor fuel, by 2015. It was one of the most popular parts of the bill, appealing to farm-state lawmakers and to those worried about energy security and eager to substitute a home-grown energy source for a portion of U.S. petroleum imports. To help things along, motor-fuel blenders receive a 51 cent subsidy for every gallon of corn-based ethanol used through the end of 2010; this year, production could reach 8 billion gallons.

..No place demonstrates the competing demands on corn better than Iowa, one of the two biggest corn-exporting states. Iowa is home to 28 ethanol plants, which consume more than a quarter of its corn crop; two dozen others are under construction or in planning stages.

Food Crisis: Countries in Crisis Requiring External Assistance

This one is from the FAO:

AFRICA (21 countries):

Exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/supplies

• Lesotho (Multiple year droughts until last season)
• Somalia (Conflict, adverse weather)
• Swaziland (Multiple year droughts until last season)
• Zimbabwe (Deepening economic crisis, drought last season, recent floods)

Widespread lack of access

• Eritrea (IDPs, economic constraints)
• Liberia (Post-conflict recovery period)
• Mauritania (Several years of drought)
• Sierra Leone (Post-conflict recovery period)

Severe localized food insecurity

• Burundi (Civil strife, IDPs and returnees)
• Central African Republic (Refugees, insecurity in parts)
• Chad (Refugees, conflict)
• Congo, Democratic Republic of (Civil strife, returnees)
• Congo, Republic of (IDPs)
• Côte d'Ivoire (Civil strife)
• Ethiopia (Insecurity in parts, localized crop failure)
• Ghana (Drought and floods)
• Guinea (Refugees)
• Guinea-Bissau (Localized insecurity)
• Kenya (Civil strife, adverse weather)
• Sudan (Civil strife)
• Uganda (Civil strife in the north, localized crop failure)

ASIA (10 countries)

Exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/supplies

• Iraq (Conflict and insecurity)

Widespread lack of access

• Afghanistan (Conflict and insecurity)
• Korea, Dem. People's Rep. of (Economic constraints and effects of past floods)

Severe localized food insecurity

• Bangladesh (Past floods and cyclone, avian influenza)
• China (Disastrous cold, ice and snow in the south)
• Nepal (Poor market access, conflict and past floods)
• Sri Lanka (Conflict and floods)
• Tajikistan (Severe cold, floods/landslides, poor market access)
• Timor-Leste (IDPs, past drought and floods)
• Viet Nam (Cold spell in the north)

LATIN AMERICA (5 countries)

Severe localized food insecurity

• Bolivia (Floods)
• Dominican Republic (Past floods)
• Ecuador (Floods)
• Haiti (Past floods)
• Nicaragua (Past floods)

EUROPE (1 country)

Exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production/supplies

• Moldova (Drought, limited access to inputs for winter cropping)

COUNTRIES WITH UNFAVOURABLE PROSPECTS FOR CURRENT CROPS

AFRICA

• Ethiopia (Insufficient rainfall)
• Kenya (Insufficient rainfall)
• Somalia (Adverse weather, conflicts)
• Zimbabwe (Early Floods and late dry spells in parts, shortage of inputs)

Food Inflation Watch: Food crisis is a chance to reform global agriculture

Martin Wolf writes in Financial Times column:

Demand factors:

• Rising incomes per head in the emerging economies
• Changing pattern of food consumption (shift from food to meat reduces food supply as it is being used to rear animals)
• Subsidised biofuels production in the West raise demand for maize
• Aggregate maize, rice, and soybeans production stagnated in 2006 and 2007 (partly due to drought)
• Increasing speculation because of declining stock

Are prices going to remain high? Two opposing forces are at work. The first is the market, which will tend to bring prices back down as supplies expand and demand shrinks. But the latter is also what we want to avoid, at least in the case of the poor, since reducing their consumption is not so much a solution as a failure. The second force is the current intense pressure on the world’s food system. This is true of both demand and costs of supply. Prices are likely to remain relatively elevated, by historical standards, unless (or until) energy prices tumble.

What needs to be done?

• humanitarian factors
• trade and other policy interventions
• longer-term productivity and production

The present crisis is a golden opportunity to eliminate this plethora of damaging interventions. The political focus of the Doha round on lowering high levels of protection is largely irrelevant. The focus should, instead, be on shifting the farm sector towards the market, while cushioning the impact of high prices on the poor.

Finally, far greater resources need to be devoted to expanding long-run supply. Increased spending on research will be essential, especially into farming in dry-land conditions. The move towards genetically modified food in developing countries is as inevitable as that of the high-income countries towards nuclear power. At least as important will be more efficient use of water, via pricing and additional investment. People will oppose some of these policies. But mass starvation is not a tolerable option.

 

The ultimate optimist and the dismal science

This article extols Jeffrey Sachs excessively by labeling him as "long before ambition and optimism conspired to make him the Man Who Would Save the World, Jeffrey Sachs was merely the Man Who Would Save Bolivia." Also, now he has a new label: "Barack Obama of economics."

...Philosophically, his proposed remedies are more closely aligned with the left-leaning John Maynard Keynes than they are with Milton Friedman, but Mr. Sachs, who is also director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, has clearly been influenced by both.

...Like Mr. Friedman, he believes in market solutions for many economic issues - he just doesn't think that unfettered markets, left to their own devices, will lift Africans out of abject poverty or stamp out environmental degradation. These crises, he insists, require strong public policies to align private interests with the goals of sustainable development.

...He insists that the path to salvation lies in a multidisciplinary approach; private players must work with willing governments, academics, scientists and non-governmental organizations to create sustainable technologies.These technologies are where he places a great deal of faith - not merely in their ability to help contain some of the environmental damage (carbon capture sequestration is an example he's fond of citing) but to improve agricultural yields with more resistant, bountiful seeds.

Fixing the food crisis: he is obsessed with creation of multi-billion dollar fund (he did that in Bolivia and Poland but attributed the failure of reforms in Russia for a lack of stabilization fund to build confidence on the Russian currency).

• Provide immediate funds to the FAO
• End ethanol subsidies
• Create $5 billion Fund to increase production in the poor countries
• Improve agriculture (R&D)