Enabling Environment Risk in Rice
As we prepared for the FARMD Annual Conference: Risk & Rice in Asia, a series of articles and newsletters on production, market, and enabling environment risk in the rice sector globally was published. This third and final edition focuses on the issues Enabling Environment Risk in Rice and contains articles, links, resources, news and information to help conference attendees and the FARMD Community better understand the issues that can arise from the enabling environment in developing countries.
Featured Article | Enabling Environment for Managing Risk in Rice
C Peter Timmer
FARMD (September 2012) | Risks in the extended rice value chain are the greatest single threat to global food security, significantly outweighing drought in the American Midwest or disease threats to wheat. Two-thirds of the world’s poorest and most food insecure households grow and/or consume rice as their staple food. Rice is increasingly the food of the poor and thus is the fulcrum of global food security. And the risks facing the world rice economy are many and varied—from uncertainties over fertilizer supplies, water availability or the quality of seed, to financing arrangements for procuring, storing, processing and transporting the grain, to the price facing farmers when they sell and consumers when they buy it in retail outlets.
Article Contributors
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Rice Prices and Food Policies in Liberia
Jean-Martin Bauer, World Food Programme
FARMD (September 2012) | In Liberia, poverty and food insecurity levels are highly sensitive to the price of rice. During the 2008 global food price crisis, the rate of severe food insecurity doubled, increasing from 4 per cent in December 2006 to 8 per cent in June 2008 in Greater Monrovia. Liberia extensively depends on rice imports, exposing the country to episodes of international price volatility. Dr Bauer shares from the Liberian experience on various avenues that could be taken to hedge against the risk of increased rice prices in a volatile global market.
Rice in the MERCOSUR: Present and Future
Alvaro Durand-Morat, Fundación PROARROZ, Argentina
FARMD (September 2012) | MERCOSUR more than tripled its rice exports over the last decade while global trade expanded only 25 percent, resulting in a significant three-fold increase in its global market share. Dr Morat shares on the MERCOSUR countries policy prescriptions in regard to rice and short term challenges that relate primarily to macroeconomic policies in the region.
Featured Project: ACIAR Food Security Research Program
ACIAR has embarked on a Food Security Research Program with a three-part strategy towards 'safeguarding food security in the rice-based farming systems of South and South-East Asia'. The third of these strategies is to pursue policy research relevant to production and trade, within which five broad areas have been identified.
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