Getting Real About Food Prices

The 2008 spike in world grain prices is widely recognised to have had serious impacts on food security and poverty, but these high grain prices are commonly described as low in historical terms – an inconsistency resulting from the use of advanced‐ and global‐economy price indices in calculating real prices. This ignores the high share of food in poor people's expenditures and the indirect effects of income growth on expenditure patterns of rich consumers. Poor consumers have not experienced the same falls in real food prices and are more vulnerable to price shocks. Different price indices must be developed to take account of differences between consumer groups.     

Overcoming Market Constraints on Pro‐Poor Agricultural Growth in Sub‐Saharan Africa

In sub‐Saharan Africa, there is fairly broad agreement that increased investment in key public goods such as roads and communications infrastructure, agricultural research and water control will be required if revitalised agricultural development is to take place. However, it has proved more difficult to reach agreement on what needs to be done to improve the performance of agricultural markets. In this article we set out an agenda for investment and policy reform in this area, providing a brief theoretical examination of the co‐ordination problems involved before examining in turn demand and supply constraints affecting smallholder farmers, and policies for price stabilisation and the co‐ordination of support services. We also argue that increased attention needs to be paid to governance issues.     

New MDGs, Development Concepts, Principles and Challenges in a Post-2015 World

As we approach 2015 the question of what, if anything, should replace the MDGs becomes increasingly important. This paper presents findings from studies on the implementation of the poverty, education and gender MDGs in Kenya and South Africa. These show how top-down processes associated with meeting the MDG targets led by government or large NGOs are disassociated from bottom-up engagements with gender, education and poverty by households or communities. A missing middle linked with professional action by teachers or civil servants and enhanced information flow means that groups from the top and the bottom talk past each other. We therefore argue that these experiences with implementing the MDGs, coupled with a variety of global changes since 2000s, mean that a major concern in developing a set of post 2015 goals is the need to address the disarticulation between ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches in international development. We link this challenge with five principles put forward for post 2015 goals and indicators: holism, equity, sustainability, ownership and global obligation. The application of this approach to work on goals and targets is illustrated in relation to nutrition/food security and secondary education.     

Institutions and Policies for Pro‐poor Agricultural Growth

Global experience with pro‐poor growth and empirical work spanning India, Malawi and Zimbabwe demonstrates the importance of agricultural growth for poverty reduction in poor rural areas, while also pointing to the need for complementary non‐farm sector growth. Theoretical arguments, historical evidence and livelihoods modelling in poor medium‐potential rural economies suggest that, contrary to thinking dominating much of current development policy, subsidies to relieve critical seasonal credit and cash restraints and reduce market and input supply uncertainties need to help in ‘kick‐starting’ agricultural markets if increased smallholder productivity in food‐grains is to drive rural non‐farm growth. Establishing the base conditions for these to work, designing and implementing them to be effective, and then phasing them out are major challenges facing policymakers.     

Youth voices thrive in Facilitating Leadership in Youth

In inner-city Washington, D.C., lives a generation of young people for whom violence, discrimination, and poverty are a daily reality. Out-of-school-time programming by Facilitating Leadership in Youth provides youth with comprehensive support and services, trusting relationships, and gradually increasing leadership opportunities to elicit positive community change.     

Markets,Institutions and Technology: Missing Links in Livelihoods Analysis

The benefits of livelihoods thinking and approaches are widely recognised. This article focuses on an important gap in much of the conceptualization and application of ‘livelihood approaches’— a lack of emphasis on markets and their roles in livelihood development and poverty reduction. The omission is important, as it can lead to failure to identify and act on a wider range of market, institutional and technological opportunities and constraints. An alternative conceptualisation is proposed, with markets as one particular set of institutional mechanisms for co‐ordination and exchange in an economy. It is argued that more explicit attention to interactions between institutions, technology and assets in livelihood analysis may be valuable in conceptualising and managing programmes for livelihood development and poverty reduction.     

Integrating Contested Aspirations,Processes and Policy: Development as Hanging In,Stepping Up and Stepping Out

This article proposes a dialogue around a conceptualisation of development as involving three complementary processes: ‘hanging in’, ‘stepping up’ and ‘stepping out’. These describe different types and scales of structural change in national and sub‐national societies and economies, in different sectors within these economies, and in people's evolving livelihoods. The simplicity and strong theoretical, empirical and experiential content of this make it a powerful framework both for interdisciplinary, inter‐sectoral, multi‐scale analysis of dynamic development processes, and for structuring dialogue about contested aspirations, assumptions, modalities and constraints among development analysts and stakeholders with different interests and paradigms.