Food aid and poverty.
by Kirwan, Barrett E.^McMillan, Margaret
(3) The FAO definition of cereals include wheat, paddy rice,
barley, maize, pop corn, rye, oats, millet, sorghum, buckwheat, quinoa,
fonio, triticale, canary seed, and mixed grains.
(4) Among countries for which data are available, Thailand,
Argentina, Nepal, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Uruguay, Pakistan, Kenya, and
Guyana had positive average net export earnings from cereals in the
1970s. This list expanded to include Vietnam, in the 1980s, but lost
Nepal and Kenya. In the 1990s, Guyana, Argentina, Thailand, Vietnam,
Hungary, Paraguay, India, and Pakistan had positive net export earnings
from cereals.
(5) "Africa today is more threatened by the possibility of
losing jobs to imported foods than it has ever witnessed in its history
(Mustapha 2007).
(6) Researchers have tried to uncover the dynamic relationship
between food aid and poverty with limited success. For example, Abdulai,
Barrett, and Hoddinott (2005) examine the relationship between food aid
and food production in Sub-Saharan Africa and find that food aid
stimulates domestic food production. The problem with this analysis is
that because the authors focus on changes in food aid and changes in
food production they uncover short-term cyclical variations around a
trend. It is precisely the trends, however, that we need to understand.
In addition, for identification, the authors focus on the effects of
shocks to changes in food aid that are unrelated to contemporaneous
changes in food production. While this is always possible to do
econometrically, the economic nature of these shocks is not clear.
Barrett Kirwan is Associate Professor in the Department of
Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Maryland. Margaret
McMillan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, Tufts
University, National Bureau of Economic Research.
This article was presented in a principal paper session at the AAEA
annual meeting (Portland, OR, July 2007). The articles in these sessions
are not subjected to the journal's standard refereeing process.
COPYRIGHT 2007 American Agricultural Economics
Association Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
Copyright 2007, Gale Group. All rights
reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.