Poverty, Food Security and Environmental Stress in Developing Areas

1
Poverty, Food Security and Environmental Stress
in Developing Areas

• Some reflections on my research program and work
  with graduate students

Chris Barrett Dept. of Applied Economics
Management
September 21, 2001
2
My Background

• Grew up along Chesapeake Bay, working and playing
  on the water, including with the state park
  service and private watermen
• Longstanding outdoors enthusiast -- hiking,
  skiing, sailing, fishing, etc.

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My Teaching Program

• Policy-oriented development economist,
• focus on empirical issues in microeconomics
• Graduate-Level Teaching
• AEM 762 Microeconomics of International
  Development
• AEM 765 Devt Microeconomics seminar
• IA 620 African Food Security and Natural
  Resources Management seminar

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My Research

• 3 foci in my research
• (1) poverty, hunger, food security, economic
  policy and the structural transformation of
  low-income societies .
• (2) individual and market behavior under risk and
  uncertainty.
• (3) the interrelationship between poverty, food
  security and environmental stress in developing
  areas .

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Graduate Students My Research

• Simply put, working with graduate students is the
  best part of my job.
• - enthusiasm and creativity
• - skills and vicarious training
• - maturity to do field-based work
• - build capacity in low-income countries
• Direct Einaudi Center predissertation workshop on
  Rural Livelihoods and Biological Resources
  Technologies and Institutions
• Co-Direct CIIFADs African Food Security and
  Natural Resources Management program, including
  new Rockefeller Foundation-funded doctoral
  training program for cohorts of scientists

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Entrée to Poverty-Food Security- Environment Nexus

• After a circuitous undergraduate route, developed
  a focus on the economics of poverty alleviation,
  with a special interest in the tropics,
  especially Africa.
• Dissertation field work in Madagascar opened my
  eyes to the inextricable relationship between
  rural poverty and natural resource degradation in
  the tropics
• - bidirectional causality between these
  phenomena
• - mutual causality by broader political economy
  factors

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My work on poverty, food security and
environmental stress

• Interrelated topics
• (1) Rangelands in east Africa
• (2) Biodiversity and wildlife conservation
• (3) Deforestation
• (4) Sustainable agricultural intensification
• (5) Christianity and the environment

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• Rangelands in East Africa

USAID Global Livestock CRSP Project Pastoral
Risk Management in East African Rangelands -
6 years, 1.95 mn - co-PI with range ecologist,
anthropologist
and rural sociologist
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• Rangelands in East Africa

Natural Resource Issues (1) Generalized versus
localized degradation - locational choice and
the commons (w/ T. Lybbert, S. Desta and L.
Coppock) (2) Water points management, fuzzy
property rights and quasi-insurance (w/J.McPeak
N.McCarthy) (3) Crop-Livestock integration and
the underlying agroecology (w/ A. Teklu) (4)
Human-wildlife conflicts (w/ I. Rhinehart
P.Sullivan)
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• Biodiversity and Wildlife Conservation

ICDPs work with Peter Arcese 1995 World Devt -
founded on untested biological and economic
assumptions 1998 Land Econ - linked wildebeest
population dynamics and peasant household model
with endogenous poaching to demonstrate threat
of conjunctural crashes due to time-varying
returns to ag labor New integrated modeling work
on Serengeti (NCEAS Packer, Sinclair,
Hilborn, Coughenour et al.)
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• Biodiversity and Wildlife Conservation

Context-Dependent Conservation Design Work with
Heidi Gjertsen (grad student), Katrina Brandon
(Cons. Intl) and Clark Gibson (UCSD) Conserving
Tropical Biodiversity Amid Weak Institutions
(2001 BioScience) - comparative advantage and
the coordination- concentration choice 2001
Working paper - adapt theory of agrarian
contracts to identify how optimal design shifts
with underlying resource and agent attributes
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• Deforestation

The Prospects for Successful Resource
Commercialization Work with Travis Lybbert (grad
student) 2000 Ecological Economics - why
bioprospecting is unlikely to be an effective
conservation tool on a wide scale 2001 Working
papers on Moroccos argan forest - why
commercial boom hasnt induced forest
conservation biology and markets
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• Deforestation

Shifting Cultivation and Tropical
Forests Irreversibility, temporal uncertainty
and spatial externalities (1997 JEEM with Amit
Batabyal) Stochastic Food Prices Slash-and-Burn
Ag (1999 Envt Devt Economics) Policy Reforms
and Threats to Fragile Margins (2001 book
chapter with Tom Reardon) Doug Browns
dissertation work bioeconomic modeling of
Central African forest agriculture
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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• Tradeoffs or Synergies? Agricultural
  Intensification, Economic Development and the
  Environment (CABI, 2000 w/David Lee)
• - ag intensification as a necessary but not
  sufficient condition for achieving food
  security, poverty alleviation and environmental
  goals

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• Natural Resources Management in African
  Agriculture (CABI, 2002 w/Frank Place and
  Abdillahi Aboud)
• online http//www.aem.cornell.edu/special_progra
  ms/AFSNRM/ICRAFBook/
• Comparative studies across Africa on soil
  fertility and soil and water conservation NRM
  as investment

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• 2001 Working paper with Sherlund and Adesina,
  Environmental Variables and Mismeasurement of
  Agricultural Productivity
• once one controls
• properly for agro-
• ecological variability,
• most Ivorien rice
• farmers appear very
• efficient

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• How have market-oriented reforms affected SAI
  incentives?
• 1999 Development Policy Review (with Reardon,
  Kelly and Savadogo)
• Problem of making markets and government work
  together effectively to induce smallholder
  investment in sustainable intensification

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• Work on System of Rice Intensification (SRI)
  adoption and disadoption dynamics in Madagascar
  (w/ Chris Moser)
• Rural financial market failures lead to
  nonadoption by poorer farmers while those with
  salaried non-farm income disadopt due to time
  demands of the method

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Sustainable Agricultural Intensification

• Agroindustrialization and environmental effects
• surprisingly underresearched topic, especially
  on downstream issues. Edited special issue of
  Environment and Development Economics on topic
  (October 2001) with Ed Barbier and Tom Reardon.

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New African Food Security and Natural Resources
Management (AFSNRM) Program Research Projects

• USAID BASIS CRSP (3 yr, 600K) Rural Markets,
  Natural Capital and Dynamic Poverty Traps in East
  Africa in Kenya Madagascar with FOFIFA, ICRAF
  and KARI

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Christianity and the environment

• My faith partly motivates my concerns about
  stewardship for both the wonders of creation and
  those less fortunate than we.
• Dabble in this arena CSR (1998) and set of
  papers with Ray Grizzle (UNH) -- Zygon,
  Environmental Ethics, Trinity Journal -- and John
  Bergstrom

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Summary Oikos

• Both people and the biosphere are suffering in
  most of the tropics today. Understanding the
  interrelationship between ecological and economic
  processes is a daunting but important challenge
  in such settings.
• Especially in collaboration with good biological
  scientists, I have found that economic theory and
  empirical methods offer useful insights as to why
  certain patterns emerge and what policies might
  prove effective. Graduate students have played
  and will play a key role in this research.