human rights a normative basis for food and nutrition relevant policies abstract this paper explores human rights as a basis for policy formulation and planning of programmes and activities that will enhance food and nutrition security the right to adequate food and to be free from hunger forms part of the contemporary international bill of human rights as adopted by the united nations it is expressly provided for in the universal declaration of human rights of 1948 and in the international convenant on economic social and cultural rights of 1966 as well as in other more recent instruments such as the convention of the rights of the child of 1989 however neither the right to food nor other rights pertaining to nutrition as an ultimate human development objective have so far been given sufficient attention by agencies dealing with food health and nutrition the paper discusses the right to food as recently elaborated within the human rights bodies of the united nations including the notion of the three levels of state obligations to respect to protect and to fulfil or assist the realization of the right to food furthermore the paper considers an analytical framework for food security and its expansion into nutrition security which can form a basis for translating food and nutrition development goals into rights and obligations as they are embedded in international legal instruments the paper proposes a framework for analysing at household community and national levels both causes of and solutions to food insecurity and malnutrition as a basis for identifying state obligations to address food and nutrition security from a human rights perspective the centrepiece of the paper is a food and nutrition security matrix that can help clarify state obligations and which countries may find useful in their attempts to find effective solutions to the nutritional problems of their people it may also serve in the dialogue between partners of official and non governmental development operation so as to identify where how and especially at what level external assistance can best support integrated government efforts the paper concludes with a set of general policy recommendations

ethiopia food for work or food for relief abstract this article examines the aims context and experience of food aid projects in ethiopia the major focus is a case study of an ethiopian food for work project the largest in sub saharan africa and favourable conclusions are drawn factors are identified which have made for this apparent success since one factor is local food shortage consideration is also given to the proposition that the concept of relief aid needs a wider definition than heretofore

determinants of the levels and distribution of pl 480 food aid 1955 1979 abstract this paper reports the results of statistical tests of hypotheses related to a number of debates surrounding the determinants of the levels and distribution of us food aid the statistical results supported the following hypotheses 1 pl 480 food aid is influenced by the need of the recipient country 2 pl 480 food aid is tied to political and military concerns of the us 3 pl 480 food aid is influenced by the political party occupying the white house 4 pl 480 food aid and us commercial sales of agricultural commodities are substitutes and 5 pl 480 food aid is inversely related to a recipient s foreign exchange holdings

objective evaluation studies the case of operation flood abstract the operation flood programme of in india is now in its third phase of implementation unfortunately a realistic socioeconomic evaluation of of cannot be located amongst the vast literature on the subject an objective evaluation study in the domain of normative policy analysis would facilitate the search for alternatives in development planning policy and institutional arrangements in this article the author attempts to raise and examine certain issues in order to gain a better understanding of the complex nature of of the discussion specifically focuses on issues such as the information gap marketing strategy and ramifications of protectionist and food aid policies of donor agencies

the monetization of project and emergency food aid project level efficiency first abstract the level of food aid monetization has increased sharply particularly in africa and especially to cover the transport and non food costs of food aid projects monetization to raise cash is not wrong in principle and increases the efficiency of cash starved projects however the focus on generating counterpart funds has obscured a more important debate about whether and when food is more appropriate than cash at the project level there can be no general predisposition to use either food or cash but guidelines must be applied in each case

impure altruism and impure selfishness altruism refers to a willingness to benefit others even at one s own expense in contrast selfishness refers to prioritizing one s own interests with no consideration for others however even if an agent is selfish he might nevertheless act as if he were altruistic out of selfish concerns triggered when his action is observed that is he might seek to feel pride in acting altruistically and to avoid the shame of acting selfishly we call such behavior impurely altruistic alternatively even if an agent is altruistic he might nevertheless give in to the temptation to act selfishly we call such behavior impurely selfish this paper axiomatizes a model that distinguishes altruism from impure altruism and selfishness from impure selfishness in the model unique real numbers separately capture altruism and the other forces of pride shame and the temptation to act selfishly we show that the model can describe recent experiments on dictator games with an exit option in addition we describe an empirical puzzle that government spending only partially crowds out consumers donations contrary to the prediction based on standard consumer theory

analyzing the welfare improving potential of land in the former homelands of south africa this article contributes to the debate on the role of land in reducing poverty in rural south africa it uses the year of arrival in the former homelands as an instrument for land access and size this identification strategy is based on the fact that african households were forcibly relocated to the homelands during the apartheid due to increasing population pressure later arrivals were less likely to be assigned land the results show that land has a large positive effect on household welfare because the homelands are relatively disadvantaged areas these results provide a lower bound for the positive effects of land on household welfare

temptation driven preferences my own behaviour baffles me for i find myself not doing what i really want to do but doing what i really loathe saint paulwhat behaviour can be explained using the hypothesis that the agent faces temptation but is otherwise a standard rational agent in earlier work gul and pesendorfer 2001 use a set betweenness axiom to restrict the set of preferences considered by dekel lipman and rustichini 2001 to those explainable via temptation we argue that set betweenness rules out plausible and interesting forms of temptation including some which may be important in applications we propose a pair of alternative axioms called dfc desire for commitment and aic approximate improvements are chosen dfc characterizes temptation as situations in which given any set of alternatives the agent prefers committing herself to some particular item from the set rather than leaving herself the flexibility of choosing later aic is based on the idea that if adding an option to a menu improves the menu it is because that option is chosen under some circumstances from this interpretation the axiom concludes that if an improvement is worse as a commitment than some commitment from the menu then the best commitment from the improved menu is strictly preferred to facing that menu we show that these axioms characterize a natural generalization of the gul pesendorfer representation copyright wiley blackwell

does food aid have disincentive effects on local production a general equilibrium perspective on food aid in ethiopia this paper examined impacts of food aid on domestic food production employing a computable general equilibrium modelling technique and using data from ethiopia the simulation experiments have shown that food aid has unambiguous disincentive effects on domestic food production the removal of food aid caused a modest increase in food prices but this stimulated food production employment and income generation effects of the latter outweighed the adverse effect of the former consequently the removal of food aid led to improvements in aggregate household welfare contrary to some concerns in the food aid literature that any reduction in food aid would hurt the poor the simulation experiments suggested that actually poor rural households and urban wage earners are the ones who benefit most in absence of food aid but entrepreneurs are more likely to encounter a marginal welfare decline we have distinguished between in kind food aid and cash equivalent transfers in order to isolate the disincentives that in kind transfers would make to domestic production from those that are related to household purchasing power problem the expansionary effect of removing food aid becomes significantly larger when it is accompanied by cash equivalent payments because the latter would provide demand side stimulus to agriculture while the removal of in kind transfers would stimulate supply side with the supply and demand side effects reinforcing each other in our modelling framework the only adverse effect would be a modest deterioration in the external current account because the expansionary effects of food aid would cause imports to rise but exports to fall

access to capital and agrarian production organisation there are two problems both universal that entrepreneurs in any economy must contend with firstly an agent generally has access only to a limited amount of working capital secondly workers hired by an agent are subject to moral hazard and this necessitates their supervision this paper models for an agrarian economy the constraints imposed on entrepreneurs activities by these two problems and endogenously determines the various organisational forms of production as well as the allocation of resources that will obtain with a simple model we endeavour to explain a diverse set of empirical observations pertaining to the less developed countries in terms of the general processes that determine the distribution of income among the various agents and the hierarchical relationships that develop among them agricultural production typically involves a period of several months between the time the inputs are purchased and the time the output is marketed access to working capital and hence to the credit market thus plays an important role in a farmer s production decisions the distribution of access to credit in turn tends to be an important determinant of income distribution in poor agrarian economies credit is invariably rationed according to the ability to offer collateral the amount of working capital a farmer can mobilise therefore depends on the amount of land he owns which is often a good proxy for his overall wealth and thus his ability to offer collateral further since hired hands have a propensity to shirk they need to be supervised and therefore the

pension transfers and farm household technical efficiency evidence from south africa this article analyzes the effect of entitlements from the old age pension program of south africa on household technical efficiency using a sample of farm households in south africa s kwazulu natal province the analysis is at the household level and off farm activities are considered as additional outputs in a nonparametric estimation of technical efficiency this approach captures the jointness between farm and off farm activities the pension s effect is identified by exploiting the age eligibility criteria in the pension program results show a positive effect of the pension and suggest that this large cash transfer can improve households ability to make use of the best available technologies

nutrition and the convention on the rights of the child abstract nutrition is not a recognized right in any of the major international human rights instruments access to food basic health services and adequate caring practices however are explicitly recognized as rights in the international bill of human rights and other important human rights instruments such as the convention on the rights of the child crc as food health and care are all necessary and in combination will ensure good nutrition nutrition in this sense becomes a right this paper describes the evolution of children s rights and how nutrition has become neglected the crc which encompasses both civil and political rights and social economic and cultural rights and thereby underlines the indivisibility of the international human rights system provides a firm base for the promotion of nutrition as a right the paper further emphasizes that development should ensure both a desirable outcome and an adequate process outcomes can be specified by goals such as improved nutritional status of children a high quality process is characterized by a high degree of participation community ownership sustainability and empowerment outcome focused strategies emphasize the achievement of goals they are relatively easy to monitor but often unsustainable process focused strategies on the other hand emphasize participation and empowerment they are difficult to monitor and they often do not result in any significant outcome both outcome focused and process focused nutrition strategies alone should be avoided a rights based strategy combines the two positive extremes rights require the fulfilment of deontological criteria interalia a high quality process implementation therefore requires a holistic approach which recognizes both the scientific and the ethical aspects of the problem at the theoretical as well as the practical level a rights based strategy goes beyond the fulfilment of needs because the state has obligations to respect protect and fulfil these rights a rights based strategy for nutrition aims at the progressive achievement of nutritional goals and the progressive establishment of a high quality process in fulfilling these obligations

the food in security impact of land redistribution in south africa microeconometric evidence from national data summary the south african land reform program has been widely criticized for its slow pace as well as its apparent lack of contribution to poverty reduction no econometric evidence of the impact of land transfers has been provided to date and this paper attempts to fill this gap by considering the impact of receiving a land grant on households food insecurity propensity score matching and univariate probit estimates using two national household surveys indicate that on average land grant recipients are more food insecure than comparable non participants recursive bivariate probit estimates suggest that selection bias is not driving this result

denmark s contribution to the world food programme a success story abstract the danish government has achieved a six fold increase in the number of people who could be fed with danish development food aid from 1990 to 1997 at a reduced total cost a change in the composition of the danish food basket from high value commodities of animal origin toward basic vegetable commodities produced this dramatic increase in the cost effectiveness of denmark s regular contribution to the world food programme the decision to change the food basket was strongly opposed by the very well organized danish meat and dairy industries and their interest organizations notwithstanding the substantial opposition from these organizations the ministry of foreign affairs maintained its commitment to phase animal commodities out of the danish food basket the world food programme was very supportive of denmark s initiative to promote a more flexible approach to the determination of donor food baskets the outstanding partnership between the ministry of foreign affairs and the world food programme has been instrumental in the successful implementation of the new danish food aid policy

introduction food policy food aid and economic adjustment abstract in this introduction to food policy s special issue the guest editors look at the various ways in which food policy food aid and economic adjustment can interact to mutual advantage as developing countries pursue economic adjustment strategies to compensate for the unprecedented world recession concern is being expressed about the condition of poor people in low income countries and the need for adjustment with a human face with increasing amounts of aid resources being used for adjustment programmes interest has grown that food aid should also be used more purposefully to support the adjustment process

effects of subsidized wheat consumption by state in india this paper reports the results of a study of the effects of the indian government s consumer subsidies on wheat demand results indicate consumption of subsidized wheat is higher in urban areas than in rural areas the public distribution of wheat in most states had little effect on demand in the commercial market which suggests the government is effective in targeting subsidized wheat to poor consumers

a future food aid regime implications of final act of the uruguay round conclusion of the uruguay round the signing and ratification of the final act and the setting up of the world trade organisation wto provide a major opportunity for establishing a new food aid regime within a liberalising global economy the uruguay round will be only one of a number of factors affecting world food production trade prices and aid and the final act falls far short of the full liberalisation of trade originally envisaged other factors which were not addressed directly during the uruguay round negotiations including the emergence of regional trading blocks in europe north america and south east asia the underlying forces of technological change that will continue to increase food production and rising population growth and commercial demand in developing countries as incomes increase are likely to have significant effects on food supply demand and price relationships but will the uruguay round provide the swing factor with other forces more or less cancelling each other out page 1994 furthermore gains brought about by the uruguay round in the agricultural sector may be offset by losses in other sectors and vice versa islam and valdes 1990 nevertheless a major change has been brought about by the uruguay round in the way food markets are viewed in the rules under which countries must operate their national food policies and the opportunities for effective use of food aid

poverty livelihood and class in rural south africa abstract using data from a national living standards survey undertaken in late 1993 this paper disaggregates and explores the economics of livelihood generation and class in rural south africa in an effort to contribute to the ongoing and vociferous debate in south africa about poverty and its alleviation pursuant to the suggestion of participants in a recent participatory poverty assessment this paper analyzes what might be termed the class structure of poverty after exploring the range of claiming systems and livelihood tactics available in rural south africa the paper offers a first look at who the poor are by disaggregating the rural population into discrete livelihood strategy classes non parametric regression methods are used to then estimate and graphically explore the nature of the livelihood mapping between endowments and real incomes in addition to identifying those endowment combinations that map to consumption levels below the poverty line the asset basis of poverty the topography of the estimated livelihood mapping helps identify the constraints that limit household s ability to effectively utilize their assets and endowments these results suggest that poverty is a matter of not only having few assets but also of constraints which limit the effectiveness with which those assets are used and poverty and livelihood policy needs to be designed accordingly

enhancing nutrition a new tool for ex ante comparison of commodity based vouchers and food transfers summary this article presents a new analytical tool for ex ante comparison of the cost effectiveness of two transfer modalities in pursuing specific nutritional objectives it does so by introducing a metric to score the nutrient value of a food basket the nutrient value score nvs and explains how this metric can be combined with full supply chain analysis and costing to generate a new tool the omega value the use of the omega value allows policy makers who design a program with nutrition objectives to compare direct food transfers and commodity based food vouchers in terms of both cost efficiency and cost effectiveness 2013 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

cash versus direct food relief abstract the usual method of providing relief to a famine region is to import food and distribute it to the needy direct food relief if there are markets for food in the region however a relief agency could just as easily distribute money to the needy and let them purchase food in the market cash relief this alternative has been much discussed in the famine literature recently the purpose of this paper is to clarify the conditions under which cash relief will be more or less effective than direct food relief by analyzing the relative effectiveness of the two policies in a formal model

human rights requirements to social and economic development abstract this paper presents the normative framework of international human rights and the duty of states to cooperate for development starting with the charter of the united nations and proceeding to examine the international bill of human rights and the various international instruments treaties and declarations built upon it by ratifying some of these instruments a large majority of states have undertaken legally binding obligations to ensure freedom from hunger and to promote adequate standards of living including food nutrition and care the paper notes that promotion of human rights and development two purposes that are closely interrelated in the charter of the united nations have since followed two separate trajectories but efforts are now under way to bring them closer together as manifested in particular by the declaration on the right to development adopted by the general assembly of the united nations in 1986 the paper further points out that under international human rights law a comprehensive system of international reporting and monitoring by expert bodies has been developed full transparency has been achieved by ensuring that the state reports are made public and their examination by the international expert bodies are open to anyone interested it is indicated that for reporting in the development field comparable transparency and examination could be developed including for international agencies and other bodies dealing with food and nutrition issues

estimation of limited dependent variable models with dummy endogenous regressors applied economists have long struggled with the question of how to accommodate binary endogenous regressors in models with binary and nonnegative outcomes i argue here that much of the difculty with limited dependent variables comes from a focus on structural parameters such as index coefcients instead of causal effects once the object of estimation is taken to be the causal effect of treatment several simple strategies are available these include conventional two stage least squares multiplicative models for conditional means linear approximation of nonlinear causal models models for distribution effects and quantile regression with an endogenous binary regressor the estimation strategies discussed in the article are illustrated by using multiple births to estimate the effect of childbearing on employment status and hours of work

countertrade and food aid in support of structural adjustment and free market transitions abstract although food aid has been advocated for countries undertaking structural adjustment policies political support for increased aid expenditures is lacking countertrade is proposed herein as a method for expanding food aid without increasing expenditures countertrade allows developing countries and the formerly centrally planned economies to accelerate growth in their export sectors while financing increased food assistance

finite additive utility representations for preferences over menus abstract i characterize a finite additive utility representation for preferences over menus the numbers of both positive and negative components in this representation are expressed explicitly in terms of preference these expressions can be used to characterize models of temptation perfectionism context effects and other phenomena

market imperfections liquidity and farm household labor allocation the case of rural south africa asset endowments and market imperfections shape households labor allocation decisions and lead to different production regimes within rural farm households in south africa this article uses a farm household model to explain the presence of three main household groups determined on the basis of the labor regime adopted small peasants working both on and off farm self cultivators autarkic in labor and hiring in households a partial generalized ordered logit is used to test the main predictions of the model and a brant test on threshold constancy is performed to identify the household specific factors affecting labor market participation the results show that liquidity constraints and market imperfections matter in the choice of the labor strategy adopted liquidity constrained households are more likely to sell labor off farm while access to information facilitates the hiring in of workers

the right to food in the post cold war era abstract this paper reviews how the end of the cold war is affecting acceptance of key international conventions and the policy environment relevant to the realization of the right to food it focuses on the international bill of human rights and finds that ratification of international human rights conventions including those containing the right to food have accelerated from 1989 to 1994 the paper goes on to analyse the policy environment for the realization of the right to food in less developed countries in relation to worldwide sociopolitical processes of fragmentation and integration taking place in the post cold war era specifically civil conflict and cultural chaos liberalizing national and international economics the spread of democratic governance growing use of politically conditioned aid and reallocation of foreign assistance resources it documents and discusses each as an impediment or opportunity to the practical realization of the right to food through improved food and nutrition security the concluding section argues that the prospects for direct implementation of rights to food as national food and development policy have become unfavourable because such policies have been economically unsustainable and because of the declining capacities of government institutions in general at the same time the application of a normative human rights approach is found to be of critical importance for evaluation and promotion of food and nutrition security by the nation state and by transnational and subnational institutions that are growing more powerful in the post cold war era

additionality or diversion food aid to eastern europe and the former soviet republics and the implications for developing countries abstract substantial flows of assistance to eastern europe and the former soviet republics fsrs since 1989 have coincided with stagnating flows of official development assistance to developing countries raising concerns about the possible diversion of resources to the former from the latter these concerns are examined empirically for food aid which formed an important component of initial assistance to the region of eastern europe and the fsr using a supply based predictor model measuring diversion in terms of the difference between actual and forecast levels of food aid flows the model indicates that european union eu food aid including commission and member state actions largely involved additional resources there was however progressively greater diversion of us food aid from developing countries the findings are supported by a qualitative examination of the budgetary practices of the us administration and the european commission the two largest providers in financing their food aid to eastern europe and the fsr globally the combination of statistical and budgetary evidence suggests that between 10 12 million tons of cereals food aid or about 20 of shipments was diverted from developing countries to the region between 1989 1990 and 1993 1994

self control and the theory of consumption to study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty we define and characterize dynamic self control dsc preferences dsc preferences are recursive and separable in economies with dsc agents equilibria exist but may be inefficient in such equilibria steady state consumption is independent of initial endowments and increases in self control increasing the preference for commitment while keeping self control constant increases the equity premium removing nonbinding constraints changes equilibrium allocations and prices debt contracts can be sustained even if the only feasible punishment for default is the termination of the contract

creating rural livelihoods some lessons for south africa from experience elsewhere abstract a development path for south africa that will create jobs and reduce poverty must include the encouragement of greater labor intensity in agriculture especially of smallholder farming which was suppressed under apartheid there is however widespread skepticism on both the left and the right about the prospects for more labor intensive farming but this skepticism is called into question by both theory and evidence of the advantages of small scale production in certain products and circumstances there are now numerous examples of this in many parts of the world the paper discusses the preconditions for the development of such farming in south africa including land reform and the need to reorient investment and supporting economic and technical services research training marketing credit from the privileged large scale white farms to the undercapitalized and neglected black smallholders

issues in valuing food aid the cash or in kind controversy abstract this paper focuses on developing a conceptual model to analyze the impacts of in kind transfers or payments of food for aid in particular attention is focused on the specific issue for food for work programs and the different methods of valuing these benefits there are three general methods used to value in kind payments 1 value at government costs 2 market value and 3 cash equivalent value no single method for estimating in kind values is uniquely appropriate and depends on the data availability and the end uses of the results the analytical approach is the standard economic model of utility maximization using indifference curves subject to a budget constraint adjusted to evaluate the effects of income in kind the analytical framework is then adopted to discuss some implications drawn from a recent ffwp evaluation conducted in ethiopia

project food aid and equitable growth income transfer efficiency first abstract this paper discusses the income transfer properties of food aid in order to shed light on the inputs necessary to ensure a contribution to equitable growth particularly with reference to the alleviation of poverty and malnutrition the author defines the concepts of income transfer efficiency and nutrition efficiency and shows that food aid which is income transfer efficient is usually also nutrition efficient some empirical evidence of the income transfer efficiency of different commodities supplied to various countries is reviewed and policy implications for the selection of food aid commodities and projects are discussed the author concludes with some working propositions designed to stimulate further debate on the selection and administration of food aid projects

capabilities as menus a non welfarist basis for qaly evaluation quality adjusted life years qalys are the most widely used measure of health in economic evaluations of health care within a welfarist framework qalys are consistent with people s preferences under stringent assumptions several authors have argued that qalys are a valid measure of health within an extra welfarist framework this paper studies the applicability of qalys within the best known extra welfarist framework sen s capability approach we propose a procedure to value capability sets and provide a foundation for qalys within sen s capability approach we show that under appropriate conditions the ranking of capabilities can be represented locally by a qaly measure and that a willingness to pay for qalys can be defined the validity of qalys as a general measure of health requires the same stringent conditions as in a welfarist framework