00000cab a22000004cb4500 IPP-00000287711 IPP 20190705105510.0 190705s2010 xx d | ||r |||||eng|| eng Timmer, Peter C. International best practice in food policy reflections on food policy analysis a quarter century after it was published 2010 The paper discussed the changes in the international context of domestic food policy decision-making since Food Policy Analysis (TImmer, Falcon and Pearson, 1983) was published more than 25 years ago. It identified five basic trends: (1) the last quarter century has seen surprisingly rapid economic growth, especially in Asia, with hundreds of millions of people pulled out of poverty; (2) a communications revolution at both the household and international levels has radically reduced transactions costs and increased access to knowledge, benefiting consumers and farmers from more competitive local food markets; (3) global financial markets became interested in “emerging economies” through global financial integration came with very poorly understood risks; (4) the rapid emergence in the 1990s of China and India as global growth engines which led to a gradual shift in the drivers of demand for commodities and natural resources (i.e., the growth path of developing countries was the primary driver of commodity prices, starting with energy prices but quickly extending to food prices); and (5) high energy prices have turned out to be a "game changer" for agriculture and the food economy (i.e higher prices for energy translated directly into greater demand for food commodities to convert into liquid fuels). Despite these changes in the international context, the three basic analytical messages from FPA remain intact: (1) the need for "incentive" food prices to stimulate food production and the rural economy; (2) the use of border prices to measure long-run opportunity costs of production and consumption; and (3) the integration of macro and trade policy into the food policy debate. The management of food policy, and the outlook for sustained poverty reduction will be radically different depending on which of these global price regimes plays out: (1) historical pathway of structural transformation with falling food prices (The structural transformation involves four main features: a falling share of agriculture in economic output and employment, a rising share of urban economic activity in industry and modern services, migration of rural workers to urban settings and a demographic transition in birth and death rates that always leads to a spurt in population growth before a new equilibrium is reached); and (2) biofuels, rising food prices, and the potential to reverse the structural transformation. In relation to finding efficient policy mechanisms that will keep the poor from falling off the pathway, there are three key lessons. First, the structural transformation has been the main pathway out of poverty for all societies, and it depends on rising productivity in both the agricultural transformation widens the gap between labor productivity in the agricultural and nonagricultural sector. Third, despite the decline in relative importance of the agricultural sector, leading to a "world without agriculture" in rich societies, economic growth and structural transformation require major investments in the agricultural sector itself. On the other hand, the demand for biofuels in rich countries has the potential to raise the price of basic agricultural commodities to such a level that the entire structural transformation could be reversed. If so, the growing use of biofuels has two alternative futures: it could spell impoverishment for much of the world’s population because of the resulting high food prices, or it could spell dynamism for rural economies and the eventual end of rural poverty. Which future turns out to be the case depends fundamentally on the technology, economics, and politics of biofuel production. On international best practices in food policy from a broader perspective, the paper raised the following views: 1) a successful food policy analyst needs an unusual blend of technical skills, mostly economic, and a broad vision of how food systems interact and evolve over time. They have to be trained in the macroeconomics of growth and development, much less economic history and must develop intuition on how complex food systems function and change; 2) there is no clear set of lessons on which institutional base provides the best incentives for high-quality analysis that is effectively plugged into the policy process; and 3) there are a set of questions that revolves around the political economy of food policy. When “politics is in command,” which seems to be the normal state of affairs for most developing countries, how do efficiency issues stay on the agenda?. Food policy Biofuels Poverty reduction Asian Journal of Agriculture and Development Vol. 7, no. 3 (Dec. 2010), 29-30 Article FI