tradeoffs or synergies assessing local and regional food aid procurement through case studies in burkina faso and guatemala we compare the impacts across a range of criteria of local and regional procurement lrp relative to transoceanic shipment of food aid in burkina faso and guatemala we find that neither instrument dominates the other across all criteria in either country although lrp commonly performs at least as well as transoceanic shipment with respect to timeliness cost market price impacts satisfying recipients preferences food quality and safety and in benefiting smallholder suppliers lrp is plainly a valuable food assistance tool but its advantages and disadvantages must be carefully weighed compared and prioritized depending on the context and program objectives

viewpoint climate impacts on agriculture searching for keys under the streetlight abstract this paper provides a critical assessment of the literature estimating the consequences of climate impacts in agriculture and the food system this literature focuses overwhelmingly on the impact of elevated co2 concentrations in the atmosphere higher temperatures and changing precipitation on staple crop yields while critically important for food security we argue that researchers have gravitated to measuring impacts under the streetlight where data and models are plentiful we argue that prior work has largely neglected the vast majority of potential economic impacts of climate change on agriculture a broader view must extend the impacts analysis to inputs beyond land including the consequences of climate change for labor productivity as well as for purchased intermediate inputs largely overlooked is the impact of climate change on the rate of total factor productivity growth and the potential for more rapid depreciation of the underlying knowledge capital underpinning this key driver of agricultural output growth this broader view must also focus more attention on non staple crops which while less important from a caloric point of view are critically important in redressing current micronutrient deficiencies in many diets around the world the paper closes with numerical simulations that demonstrate the extent to which limited input and output coverage of climate impacts can lead to considerable underestimation of the consequences for food security and economic welfare of particular significance is the finding that humans in the humid tropics are likely more vulnerable to heat stress than are many of the well adapted crops such as rice by omitting the impact of heat stress on humans most studies of climate impacts greatly understate the welfare losses in the world s poorest economies

from paper to plastic understanding the impact of ewic on wic recipient behavior abstract evidence shows that the special supplemental nutrition program for women infants and children wic is underutilized wic enrolls 52 7 of eligible persons and participants claim a fraction of available benefits researchers suggest that people underutilize wic because of the time needed to enroll in and use wic and because participants may believe that if others notice them participating in wic community members will stigmatize them recently enacted policies may reduce both time costs and potential for stigma associated with wic congress mandated that by 2020 all states disburse wic benefits through an electronic benefits transfer ewic system given that ewic reduces the time required for each transaction and and makes it more difficult to identify beneficiaries we expect wic redemptions to increase in addition ewic might also increase the chance wic recipients choose non wic foods for redemption increasing non wic expenditures to measure the impact of ewic on wic redemptions and non wic food expenditures we analyze data on grocery expenditures of 11 887 wic participating households in one state over the period it implemented ewic we find that after beneficiaries began redeeming wic benefits through ewic spending on non wic eligible foods did not change but redemptions of wic benefits increased

a note on the rationing policies of multiple demand classes with lost sales abstract we study inventory rationing in a system with multiple demand classes and lost sales it is assumed to have at most one outstanding order resulting in two periods in an order cycle separated by the time of order release we review the most related work by melchiors 2001 2003 ph d thesis university of aarhus int j prod econ 81 82 11 461 468 and find that the existing approximated and optimal policies are not easy to obtain due to computational complexity also as the rationing issue before order release is not well addressed in literature in this paper we prove the static rationing being optimal furthermore in such a system with two distinct periods the optimal rationing policy is a combination of a dynamic policy during the replenishment lead time and a static policy before order release in order to make the rationing policies to be readily used in practice we introduce two approximated methods for calculating the rationing levels in two periods respectively the results in particular the combination of static and dynamic rationing outperform the existing approximations in literature in addition the computation is obviously simplified due to the efficient algorithm of dynamic rationing and the explicit expressions of static rationing

the economics of poverty traps and persistent poverty an asset based approach abstract longitudinal data on household living standards open the way to a deeper analysis of the nature and extent of poverty while a number of studies have exploited this type of data to distinguish transitory from more chronic forms of income or expenditure poverty this paper develops an asset based approach to poverty analysis that makes it possible to distinguish deep rooted persistent structural poverty from poverty that passes naturally with time due to systemic growth processes drawing on the economic theory of poverty traps and bifurcated accumulation strategies this paper briefly discusses some feasible estimation strategies for empirically identifying poverty traps and long term persistent structural poverty as well as relevant extensions of the popular foster greer thorbecke class of poverty measures the paper closes with reflections on how asset based poverty can be used to underwrite the design of persistent poverty reduction strategies

is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective is land titling in sub saharan africa cost effective a cost benefit analysis suggests that the current system of formal titling should not be extended in rural madagascar and that any new system of land registration would have to be quite inexpensive to be worthwhile indeed establishing a modern property rights system without legally recognizing informal rights may expand the scope for rent seeking thus creating additional insecurity atwood 1990 purchasing a titled plot without easily being able to update the name on the document exposes the buyer to the risk that a relative of the seller sharing the family name might subsequently claim the plot or challenge the transfer analyses omitted here for brevity indicate that there is no significant advantage to owning titled land in terms of a household s access to formal credit after controlling for the household s landholdings within the mailles such land being much more likely to be titled and titled plots are no more likely to be used as collat

how do stakeholder interactions influence national food security policy in the caribbean the case of saint lucia abstract increasingly multi stakeholder processes have been recognized as being necessary to the development of public policies seeking to promote systemic innovation in response to complex and multidimensional challenges such as household food security rural development and environmental change saint lucia a small island developing state located in the caribbean has been grappling with a wide range of agriculture food and nutrition security challenges with varying degrees of policy success recognizing the significance of the challenge this paper explores the nature of the stakeholder interactions surrounding the development of saint lucia s 2009 2015 national agricultural policy and considers some of the implications for food and agriculture related policy outcomes results reveal a general lack of supportive conditions for effective multi stakeholder processes including low stakeholder participation levels conflicting roles of different forms of social capital in the interactions between stakeholders and missing boundary organizations capable of facilitating a transition towards more flexible and adaptive institutions enhanced knowledge exchange and learning and greater trust among stakeholders in the policy network future avenues for research and development are subsequently identified

is there persistence in the impact of emergency food aid evidence on consumption food security and assets in rural ethiopia we identify the impact of emergency food aid programs after the 2002 drought in rural ethiopia on future welfare based on a difference in differences matching estimator participation in food for work increases growth in total consumption and food consumption eighteen months after the drought separately receiving free food raises growth in food consumption but surprisingly negatively impacts food security food for work benefited households in the middle and upper tail of the consumption distribution while the better targeted free food program benefited the poorest evidence suggests these impacts demonstrate accumulated and persistent effects of food aid received in the first twelve months after the drought

a dynamic rationing policy for continuous review inventory systems stock rationing is an inventory policy that allows differential treatment of customer classes without using separate inventories in this paper we propose a dynamic rationing policy for continuous review inventory systems which utilizes the information on the status of the outstanding replenishment orders for both backordering and lost sales environments we conduct simulation studies to compare the performance of the dynamic policy with the static critical level and the common stock policies and quantify the gain obtained we propose two new bounds on the optimum dynamic rationing policy that enables us to tell how much of the potential gain the proposed dynamic policy realizes we discuss the conditions under which stock rationing both dynamic and static is beneficial and assess the value of the dynamic policy

risk sharing and public transfers we use public transfers in the form of food aid to test for the presence of risk sharing arrangements at the village level in rural ethiopia we reject perfect risk sharing but find evidence of partial risk sharing via transfers there is also evidence consistent with crowding out of informal insurance linked to food aid programmes

universal food security program and nutritional intake evidence from the hunger prone kbk districts in odisha this article provides evidence on the role of consumer food subsidies in improving nutritional intake and diet quality by evaluating the expansion of the government food assistance program coverage in the hunger prone state of odisha in india in 8 districts of odisha popularly known as the kalahandi balangir koraput kbk region which is notable for extreme poverty and starvation deaths the government did away with the targeted food assistance program in 2008 and made the scheme universal using a difference in difference methodology over two repeated cross sectional household surveys this article finds that the shift from targeted to a universal food security program in the kbk region of odisha has led to an improvement in the household nutritional intake and diet quality further examination suggests that proportion of households consuming below the recommended dietary allowance of calorie fats and protein has declined significantly in this region post the intervention

food aid and child nutrition in rural ethiopia abstract this paper uses a unique panel data set from ethiopia to examine the determinants of participation in and receipts of food aid through free distribution fd and food for work ffw results show that aggregate rainfall and livestock shocks increase household participation in both fd and ffw ffw also seems well targeted to asset poor households the probability of receiving fd does not appear to be targeted based on household wealth but fd receipts are lower for wealthier households the effects of fd and ffw on child nutritional status differ depending on the modality of food aid and the gender of the child both ffw and fd have a positive direct impact on weight for height households invest proceeds from fd in girls nutrition while earnings from ffw are manifested in better nutrition for boys the effects of the gender of the aid recipient are not conclusive

finding default understanding the drivers of default on contracts with farmers organizations under the world food programme purchase for progress pilot during the past two decades food assistance policy has shifted toward local or regional food purchases and away from purchases from donor countries while most local and regional procurement occurs through hard tendering processes open to large scale firms and farms there is growing interest in identifying how and whether to procure from smallholder farmer organizations to date little is known about the drivers of successful contracting with farmers organizations fos we utilize data from the united nations world food programme purchase for progress pilot in three east african countries to predict defaults on contracts we examine four possible explanations country contexts fo characteristics prior experience with contracts and contract modalities and their relationship to local spot market prices the single most important predictor of default is the increase in market prices between contract approval and delivery yet while increases in market prices are linked to increases in default this relationship is decreasing in contract size indicating search costs associated with breaking contracts our findings yield both generalizable and context specific insights about whether and when procuring from smallholder farmers can be successfully integrated into the food assistance toolkit this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

on the choice and impacts of innovative international food assistance instruments summary the rise of new food assistance instruments including local and regional procurement cash and vouchers has surpassed increase in understanding of the tradeoffs among and impacts of these options relative to traditional food aid response choices rarely appear to result from systematic response analyses further impacts along multiple dimensions timeliness cost effectiveness local market effects recipient satisfaction food quality impact on smallholder suppliers etc may be competing or synergistic no single food assistance tool is always and everywhere preferable a growing body of evidence including the papers in this special section nonetheless demonstrates the clear value added of new food assistance instruments

the role of agriculture in economic development visible and invisible surplus transfers the financial surplus of agriculture has been central to theories of the role of agriculture in economic development morrisson and thorbecke mt have used a constant price social accounting matrix sam framework to measure rigorously the financial surplus of agriculture and decompose the mechanisms of surplus extraction history and theory have however stressed the role of prices as an invisible transfer mechanism in addition to the visible transfers identified in the sam framework we extend the mt approach by defining and measuring the real surplus of agriculture and decomposing the mechanisms of surplus extraction between visible and invisible financial transfers using an archetype computable general equilibrium model for poor african nations we trace the generation transfer and use of an agricultural surplus created by a productivity gain in agriculture this shows that prices indeed play an overwhelmingly important role in transferring a surplus from agriculture to the benefit of the rest of

food value chain transformations in developing countries selected hypotheses on nutritional implications we examine how the transformation of food value chains fvcs influence the triple malnutrition burden undernourishment micronutrient deficiencies and over nutrition in developing countries we propose a fvc typology modern traditional modern to traditional and traditional to modern that takes into account the participants the target market and the products offered next we propose selected hypotheses on the relationship between each fvc category and elements of the triple malnutrition burden the primary finding is that the transformation of fvcs creates challenges and opportunities for nutrition in developing countries for example modern fvcs may increase over nutrition problems and alleviate micronutrient deficiencies for urban people with relatively high incomes however they have little nutritional impacts among rural residents and urban poor people who primarily depend on traditional fvcs to access adequate quantities of calories and micronutrients in addition modern food manufacturers are leveraging traditional distribution networks modern to traditional fvcs substantially increasing access to low priced processed packaged foods in rural areas and low income urban neighbors with mixed impacts on the triple burden of malnutrition further research should focus on the influence of fvc transformation on reduction of micronutrient deficiencies on modeling demand substitution effects across food categories and the attendant policy implications for malnutrition

restructuring the hong kong gas industry in july 1995 the consumer council of hong kong published a report on the gas industry in hong kong the report attacked the non interventionist and safety policies of the government as having helped the town gas monopolist to earn excessive profits to the detriment of its customers the report proposed a restructuring of the gas industry with an aim of introducing competition into the industry this paper discusses the structure and performance of the energy industry in hong kong outlining the major proposals of the consumer council and its methodology pitfalls based on the experiences of industry restructuring in the usa and uk the author provides an alternative approach to restructuring the gas industry in hong kong

a dynamic inventory model with the right of refusal we consider a dynamic inventory production model with general convex order production costs and excess demand that can be accepted or refused by the firm excess demand that is accepted is backlogged and results in a backlog cost whereas demand that is refused results in a lost sales charge endogenizing the sales decision is appropriate in the presence of general convex order costs so that the firm is not forced to backlog a unit whose subsequent satisfaction would reduce total profits in each period the firm must determine the optimal order and sales strategy we show that the optimal policy is characterized by an optimal buy up to level that increases with the initial inventory level and an order quantity that decreases with the initial inventory level more importantly we show the optimal sales strategy is characterized by a critical threshold a backlog limit that dictates when to stop selling this threshold is independent of the initial inventory level and the amount purchased we investigate various properties of this new policy as demand stochastically increases the amount purchased increases but the amount backlogged decreases reflecting a shift in the way excess demand is managed we develop two regularity conditions one that ensures some backlogs are allowed in each period and another that ensures the amount backlogged is nondecreasing in the length of the planning horizon we illustrate the buy up to levels in our model are bounded above by buy up to levels from the pure lost sales and pure backlogging models we explore additional extensions using numerical experiments

community based risk management arrangements a review summary risk and its consequences pose a formidable threat to poverty reduction efforts this article reviews a plethora of community based risk management arrangements across the developing world these types of arrangements are garnering greater interest in light of the growing recognition of the relative prominence of household or individual specific idiosyncratic risk as well as the increasing shift towards community based development funding the article discusses potential advantages such as targeting cost and informational and disadvantages such as exclusion and inability to manage correlated risk of these arrangements and their implications for the design of community based social protection programs and policies

food aid and adult nutrition in rural ethiopia insight into the role of safety nets that contribute to adult nutrition is an important component to understanding the dynamics of poverty in developing countries this article uses panel data from rural ethiopia on individual nutritional status to test for an effect of public transfers on adult body mass index bmi results show that among adult household members male members are the primary beneficiaries of food aid as male and female aid recipients tend to invest aid receipts in male household members these results are consistent with a theory in which additional resources are allocated to members of the household whose market returns are higher or those who engage in activities that expend higher levels of energy for high asset households female household members benefit if the aid recipient is a female women in low asset households appear to be adversely affected by aid receipts and evidence suggests that women with little bargaining power suffer the most the results suggest that aid receipts are useful in mitigating fluctuations in adult bmi over a short time period

escaping poverty and becoming poor who gains who loses and why abstract different households have followed very different economic trajectories this study of 35 north indian villages shows members of 11 1 of 6 376 households in these villages have overcome poverty in the last 25 years while members of another 7 9 have fallen into poverty households escape from poverty is assisted by one set of factors but an entirely different set of factors is associated with households decline two distinct sets of policies are required thus one set to promote escape from poverty and another set to arrest decline into poverty poverty has some distinctly local antecedents a methodology for tracking changes in poverty at the local level is developed that community groups and others can use to assess change and examine causes

stock rationing in an m ek 1 make to stock queue this paper considers the stock rationing problem of a single item make to stock production system with several demand classes and lost sales when demand is poisson and processing time has an erlang distribution we show that a single state variable called work storage level can be employed to completely capture the information regarding inventory level and the status of current production the optimal rationing policy can be characterized by a sequence of monotone critical work storage levels for each demand class there exists a work storage level at or below which it is optimal to start rejecting the demand of this class in anticipation of future arrival of higher priority demands the optimal production policy can also be characterized by a critical work storage level our numerical examples indicate that a critical stock level policy which ignores information on the status of current production performs very well

optimal production and rationing policy of two stage tandem production system abstract the rationing literature has been so far oblivious to the fact that sellable items may not only be finished products but also intermediate products to manufacture subsequent sellable products we address this gap by considering an inventory rationing problem in a two product tandem make to stock production inventory system bulk demand arrives to a partial batch production system with exponentially distributed production time for each batch the management has to decide whether to run or stop production and whether the various classes of demand for both products intermediate product ip and finished product or end product ep have to be satisfied from available inventory or not in which case demand is lost in order to maximize the firm s expected profit we present the corresponding dynamic programming formulation and characterize the optimal policy the resulting policy depends on dynamic switching curves which define a thresholds to continue or discontinue production and b thresholds to satisfy or turn down incoming orders we identify the key value drivers and compare various heuristic policies through extensive numerical analyses

restricted time remembering policies for the inventory rationing problem abstract we analyse an s q inventory model with unit poisson demand several demand classes and lost sales when dealing with different demand classes the usual approach is to control the inventory by critical levels at which stock is reserved for demand of higher priority we focus on time remembering policies where the critical levels are allowed to depend on the time since the actual outstanding order if any was issued in particular we introduce a new class of policies called restricted time remembering rtr policies we divide the lead time in m intervals of time and restrict the critical levels of the rtr policy to be constant over each interval of time this policy is much easier to implement than the optimal rationing policy where the critical levels can change continuously over time and in a numerical study we show that the performance of the rtr policy is close to that of the optimal policy even when the number of intervals is 2 or 3

a threshold inventory rationing policy for service differentiated demand classes motivated by a study of the logistics systems used to manage consumable service parts for the u s military we consider a static threshold based rationing policy that is useful when pooling inventory across two demand classes characterized by different arrival rates and shortage stockout and delay costs the scheme operates as a q r policy with the following feature demands from both classes are filled on a first come first serve basis as long as on hand inventory lies above a threshold levelk once on hand inventory falls below this level low priority i e low shortage cost demand is backordered while high priority demand continues to be filled we analyze this static policy first under the assumption that backorders are filled according to a special threshold clearing mechanism structural results for the key performance measures are established to enable an efficient solution algorithm for computing stock control and rationing parameters i e q r andk numerical results confirm that the solution under this special threshold clearing mechanism closely approximates that of the priority clearing policy we next highlight conditions where our policy offers significant savings over traditional round up and separate stock policies encountered in the military and elsewhere finally we develop a lower bound on the cost of the optimal rationing policy numerical results show that the performance gap between our static threshold policy and the optimal policy is small in environments typical of the military and high technology industries

inequality as a determinant of malnutrition and unemployment policy this paper explores the policy implications that are obtained once it is recognized that at low nutrition intakes a person s productivity is an increasing function of intake in the context of a fully general equilibrium model it is shown that if aggregate assets in an economy are neither large nor small certain patterns of lorenz improving asset redistributions or nutrition transfers increase aggregate output and reduce the volume of involuntary unemployment and the incidence of undernourishment copyright 1987 by royal economic society

why has economic growth been more pro poor in some states of india than others abstract we use 20 household surveys for india s 15 major states spanning 1960 1994 to study how the sectoral composition of economic growth and initial conditions interact to influence how much growth reduced consumption poverty the elasticities of measured poverty to farm yields and development spending did not differ significantly across states but the elasticities of poverty to urban and rural non farm output varied appreciably and the differences were quantitatively important to the overall rate of poverty reduction states with higher elasticities did not experience higher rates of non farm growth the non farm growth process was more pro poor in states with initially higher literacy higher farm productivity higher rural living standards relative to urban areas lower landlessness and lower infant mortality

does food aid really have disincentive effects new evidence from sub saharan africa summary limited empirical evidence exists either to refute or confirm the pervasive belief that food aid has significant disincentive effects on recipient food production using household level data from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that while simple descriptive statistics appear consistent with the disincentive effects hypothesis once one controls properly for the endogeneity of food aid receipt no empirical support remains for the hypothesis that food aid creates disincentive effects among recipient households the macro economic evidence yields similar findings applying vector autoregression methods to national level data controlling for possible confounding variables we find that food aid has no disincentive effect on food production

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

inventory rationing in a make to stock production system with several demand classes and lost sales this paper considers the stock rationing problem of a single item make to stock production system with several demand classes and lost sales for the case of poisson demands and exponential production times we show that the optimal policy can be characterized by a sequence of monotone stock rationing levels for each demand class there exists a stock rationing level at or below which it is optimal to start rejecting the demand of this class in anticipation of future arrival of higher priority demands a simple queueing model is analyzed to compute the operating cost of a rationing policy in a numerical study we compare the optimal rationing policy with a first come first served policy to investigate the benefit of stock rationing under different operating conditions of the system

relief programs when it may be better to give food instead of cash abstract a standard way to give relief to the needy is to organize employment or public works programs it is often argued that in many situations paying workers in cash instead of food may be the superior option the aim of this paper is to caution that some plausible spillover effects may weaken this argument observe that paying wages in food and in cash can have differential effects on prices a cash for work program would typically enhance the demand for food cause food prices to rise and result in more food in the hands of those who have received the wages this will mean that those who are left out of the program for example the old and the infirm could be worse off

food and cash transfers evidence from colombia we study food engel curves among the poor population targeted by a conditional cash transfer programme in colombia after controlling for the endogeneity of total consumption and for the price variability across villages our estimates imply that an increase in consumption by 10 would lead to a decrease of 1 in the share of food however quasi experimental estimates of the impact of the programme show that the share of food increases this result is not inconsistent with the hypothesis that the programme could increase the bargaining power of women inducing a more than proportional increase in food consumption

recipients satisfaction with locally procured food aid rations comparative evidence from a three country matched survey summary using survey data from natural experiments in three countries that simultaneously received food aid sourced locally and from the united states we test the hypothesis that locally sourced commodities are more culturally appropriate and thus preferred over traditional food aid commodities sourced from the donor country we use a semi nonparametric regression method to estimate recipients satisfaction with these commodities across a range of criteria we establish that recipients of locally procured rations are generally more satisfied with the commodities they receive than are recipients of us sourced foods this pattern is especially pronounced among less well off recipients

post green revolution food systems and the triple burden of malnutrition developing country food systems have changed dramatically since the green revolution period at the same time malnutrition still represents a challenge and is now understood to encompass the three simultaneous dimensions of undernourishment micronutrient deficiencies and over nutrition manifest in overweight and obesity these changes in food systems and in the understanding of the global malnutrition challenge necessitate fresh thinking about food systems based strategies to reduce malnutrition this paper introduces a special section that offers such new perspectives we discuss trends with respect to indicators of the triple burden of malnutrition to understand the extent of global malnutrition challenges and then relate those to food systems transformation in developing countries

impacts of in kind transfers on household food consumption evidence from targeted food programmes in bangladesh this article examines the impact of wheat transfers and cash incomes on wheat consumption and wheat markets using propensity score matching techniques the mpc for wheat is on average 0 33 ranging form essentially zero for food for work a programme with large transfers to 0 51 for food for education econometric estimates indicate that the total marginal propensity to consume mpc wheat out of small wheat transfers to poor households is approximately 0 25 while mpcs for wheat out of cash income are near zero this increase in demand for wheat reduces the potential price effect of the three major targeted programmes by about one third

food aid targeting in ethiopia a study of who needs it and who gets it abstract the need for systematic empirical analysis of food aid targeting and impacts is overwhelming especially given the large numbers of people concerned and volume of funds allocated to the problem of feeding ethiopia s food insecure this research examines the efficiency of food aid targeting in rural ethiopia based on empirical evidence from a nationally representative survey of 4166 farm households a key finding of the study is that there is no significant association between household food insecurity vulnerability and food aid receipts a result of high errors of exclusion and inclusion at both the wereda and household levels four factors are identified as causes of the high level of targeting error 1 the primary beneficiaries of food aid programs are found to be households at the extremes in terms of food availability those with the least and those with the most food available 2 a disproportionate number of female and aged heads of households received food aid irrespective of their food needs 3 an inability of the food aid system to reach households outside of the historically deficit areas and 4 a disproportionate concentration of food aid in the region of tigray

child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia this brief summarizes the results of a gender impact evaluation study entitled child growth shocks and food aid in rural ethiopia conducted between 1995 and 1996 in ethiopia the study observed the impact of food aid on child growth and shocks in communities on the child level food aid has a positive significant impact on the growth in height of children the total amount of food aid appears on average to be sufficient to offset the negative effects of plot damage on child growth given the fact there remains a massive amount of child stunting there must be large amounts of mis targeting of aid girls seem to be more resilient to shocks than boys

the economics and nutritional impacts of food assistance policies and programs recent evidence on malnutrition and poverty raise important questions on the role of food assistance policies and programs in this review article we examine evidence on the economic and nutritional impacts of international food assistance programs faps and policies the returns on investments in faps are on average high but depend considerably on the targeting and cost structures as well as on food quality and role of complementary activities we disaggregate findings into four classes of recipients returns to faps are highest for children under two but faps oriented towards early childhood interventions are less well funded than are interventions aimed at school age children or at the broader largely adult population even though available evidence indicates that these latter classes of interventions offer considerably lower average returns in economic health and nutrition terms nonetheless fap effectiveness in achieving any of several objectives varies with a range of key factors including targeting additionality seasonality timeliness incentive effects social acceptability and political economy considerations

dynamic inventory rationing for systems with multiple demand classes and general demand processes we consider the dynamic rationing problem for inventory systems with multiple demand classes and general demand processes we assume that backorders are allowed our aim is to find the threshold values for this dynamic rationing policy for single period systems dynamic critical level policy is developed and the detailed cost approximation subject to this policy is derived for multiperiod systems a dynamic rationing policy with periodic review is proposed the numerical study shows that our dynamic critical level policies are close to being optimal for various parameter settings

how accurate is food for work self targeting in the presence of imperfect factor markets evidence from ethiopia effective targeting of transfers is a key issue in public policy to combat poverty much faith is presently placed in self targeting mechanisms such as public employment schemes supported by food for work transfers where targeting errors have been observed these are usually attributed to mismanagement of key operational details such as the project s wage rate using a unique data set from rural ethiopia we demonstrate that targeting errors may also have structural causes in some low income countries we hypothesise that imperfect factor markets generate a predictable dispersion across households in reservation wage rates that breaks down the unconditionally positive relation between income and shadow wages on which the theory of self targeting public employment programmes rests our results confirm that the inaccuracy of ffw targeting stems from the fact that in rural ethiopia higher income households are endowed with more labour per unit of land or animal due to poor factor markets in land and liv

smallholder participation in contract farming comparative evidence from five countries summary supermarkets specialized wholesalers processors and agro exporters are transforming the marketing channels into which smallholder farmers sell produce in low income economies we develop a conceptual framework with which to study contracting between smallholders and a commodity processing firm we then synthesize results from empirical studies of contract farming arrangements in five countries ghana india madagascar mozambique and nicaragua the resulting meta narrative documents patterns of participation the welfare gains associated with participation reasons for nonparticipation the significant extent of contract noncompliance and the considerable dynamism of these value chains as farmers and firms enter and exit frequently

shocks and their consequences across and within households in rural zimbabwe abstract increasing attention is now being paid to poverty dynamics in developing countries this work links the extent to which households smooth consumption or smooth assets given income shocks the empirical evidence on the churning of households in and out of poverty and the possibility that temporary shocks can have permanent consequences using longitudinal data from rural zimbabwe this paper extends the discussion of these issues by disaggregating the impact of shocks by levels of asset holdings by disaggregating the impact of shocks on individual level welfare and by assessing the extent to which such shocks have permanent consequences by doing so it assesses the validity of distinguishing between asset and consumption smoothing and provides insights into whether poverty dynamics assessed at the household level provide an adequate picture of dynamics at the individual level

agrifood industry transformation and small farmers in developing countries summary this article introduces this special issue on the rapid transformation of the agrifood industry in developing countries and its effects on small farmers we review the literature from the late 1980s to the present and find evidence first of food processing then retail transformation and mixed evidence of impacts on small farmers both inclusion particularly with resource providing contracts and exclusion sometimes from scale constraint sometimes from inadequate non land assets the special issue papers contribute to the debate by confirming the mix of cases of inclusion and exclusion the cases are main in horticulture and dairy key hopes for smallholder development

improving the efficiency targeting of malawi s farm input subsidy programme big pain small gain abstract the farm input subsidy programme fisp in malawi was introduced in the 2005 2006 season against a background of bad weather affecting production and prolonged food shortages vouchers are distributed empowering eligible farmers to exchange them for fixed quantities of inputs at subsidized prices since its inception there has been a debate at national level about whether the fisp s potential has been fully exploited with policy makers exploring options to improve the programme proposals include targeting efficient and productive farmers to maximize returns in this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of these proposed changes to the existing fisp design by utilizing two waves of the lsms isa survey merged with climatic data we estimate how the national demand for agricultural inputs varies according to a variation in the targeting criteria by means of a two stage demand system then we identify more efficient farmers by means of a stochastic frontier approach we observe a mismatch between voucher recipients and efficiency with approximately 60 of vouchers being allocated to the three bottom quintiles of efficiency this mismatch is observed also at the spatial level with more vouchers going to districts characterized by less efficient production while concerns on the distributional impacts of the new criteria are discussed together with some suggestions for spatially diversifying the structuring of the policy and incentivizing crop diversification our results highlight a high substitutability of commercial with subsidized inputs by new eligible farmers consequently simulating the targeting policy variation we obtain an outcome that would lead only to a limited increases in predicted food expenditure ranging from 0 27 to 0 8 and maize production from 0 2 to 1 3 scope for analysing different adjustments in the functioning of fisp are thus proposed to policy makers

war and stature growing up during the nigerian civil war the nigerian civil war of 1967 70 was precipitated by secession of the igbo dominated south eastern region to create the state of biafra it was the first civil war in africa the predecessor of many we investigate the legacies of this war four decades later using variation across ethnicity and cohort we identify significant long run impacts on human health capital individuals exposed to the war at all ages between birth and adolescence exhibit reduced adult stature and these impacts are largest in adolescence adult stature is portentous of reduced life expectancy and lower earnings

agricultural research and policy for better health and nutrition in developing countries a food systems approach this article is about the two way causal relationships between the global food system and health and nutrition it argues that the global food system begins and ends with health and that the prioritization and implementation of agricultural research and policy should consider health and nutrition effects an integrated health and food policy approach is likely to be more effective in achieving both health and economic development goals that the current practice of separate sectorial policies the article identifies a large number of health and nutrition factors affecting and affected by the food system and suggests research and policies to enhance positive effects and reduce negative ones

dynamic inventory rationing with mixed backorders and lost sales abstract customers may react differently when stockouts occur in this paper we investigate the rationing policy for an inventory system with a mixture of demand classes of backorder type and lost sales type since the penalty cost of backorders varies with time the priorities of demand classes also alter with time this totally changes the problem structure compared with the classic rationing models a dynamic rationing policy is studied in this paper by considering the dynamics of demand priorities a markov decision model is developed to obtain the optimal dynamic rationing levels for multiple demand classes the results indicate that between the priority switching points rationing levels often exhibit different patterns for lost sales demand classes the rationing levels always decrease as the remaining time approaches to zero for backorder demand classes the rationing levels increase in some parts due to declining of the priorities the rationing levels of all demand classes finally decline to zero to reduce the inventory holding cost the application of dynamic rationing is further extended from a single period model to a multi period s t model where unit cost has to be included the optimal ordering policy is proved to be a myopic base stock policy and the dynamic rationing policy in the single period model can still be applied with modified time independent penalty costs for lost sales classes to overcome the computational complexity a heuristic dynamic rationing policy is introduced due to its good outcome implementing such a heuristic dynamic rationing policy can be a practical solution for inventory system with mixed backorders and lost sales in order to enhance the system performance

what drives program choice in food security crises examining the response analysis question over the past decade the analysis of food security crises has improved and a wider range of responses is available but the question remains is improved analysis driving program response choices in food security interventions this research considers the response analysis question in the horn of africa and documents the role of evidence and other factors influencing program choice based on interviews with donor agency and government staff this paper briefly notes existing tools proposes a road map for response analysis explores the way in which donor resources have changed and outlines major factors that constrain or shape response choice

work incentives and the food stamp program abstract labor supply theory makes strong predictions about how the introduction or expansion of a social welfare program impacts work effort although there is a large literature on the work incentive effects of afdc and the eitc relatively little is known about the work incentive effects of the food stamp program and none of the existing literature is based on quasi experimental methods we use the cross county introduction of the program in the 1960s and 1970s to estimate the impact of the program on the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply earnings and family cash income consistent with theory we find reductions in employment and hours worked when food stamps are introduced the reductions are concentrated among families headed by single woman

dynamic inventory rationing strategies for inventory systems with two demand classes poisson demand and backordering we study inventory systems with two demand classes critical and non critical poisson demand and backordering we analyze dynamic rationing strategies where the number of items reserved for critical demand depends on the remaining time until the next order arrives different from results in the literature we do not discretize demand but derive a set of formulae that determine the optimal rationing level for any possible value of the remaining time moreover we show that the cost parameters can be captured in a single relevant dimension which allows us to present the optimal rationing levels in charts and lookup tables that are easy to implement numerical examples illustrate that the optimal dynamic rationing strategy outperforms all static strategies with fixed rationing levels

agricultural technology productivity and poverty in madagascar summary this paper uses a unique spatially explicit dataset to study the link between agricultural performance and rural poverty in madagascar we show that controlling for geographical and physical characteristics communes that have higher rates of adoption of improved agricultural technologies and consequently higher crop yields enjoy lower food prices higher real wages for unskilled workers and better welfare indicators the empirical evidence strongly favors support for improved agricultural production as an important part of any strategy to reduce the high poverty and food insecurity rates currently prevalent in rural madagascar