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Year of<br />

Agriculture<br />

at<strong>SAIS</strong><br />

The generally steady evolution of<br />

prices up until the early 2000s came to<br />

be expected as a matter of course. This<br />

sense of complacency was fostered by<br />

a belief in technological progress—<br />

associated in part with overconfidence<br />

in the wake of the “green revolution”<br />

of the 1960s and 1970s and in part<br />

with the international organizational<br />

infrastructure that created a big food<br />

aid industry to supply spots mired in<br />

sudden, acute scarcity. Chief among<br />

these organizations were the United<br />

Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization<br />

(FAO); the World Bank and<br />

regional multilateral banks, such as<br />

the Inter-American Development Bank,<br />

the Asian Development Bank and the<br />

African Development Bank; and superpower<br />

agricultural producers, including<br />

the United States and some of the<br />

European Union member countries.<br />

Along came the 2000s and with<br />

them two great international agricultural<br />

price shocks. In 2007–08, sudden<br />

price increases in the previously placid<br />

agricultural sector were responsible for<br />

food riots in countries as different and<br />

far apart as Burkina Faso, Egypt, Haiti,<br />

Madagascar, Mexico, Philippines, Senegal<br />

and Yemen.<br />

Scholars, analysts, policymakers,<br />

major agribusiness corporations and<br />

farmers themselves have highlighted<br />

a multiplicity of causes behind the<br />

higher commodity prices.<br />

On the supply side, the oil price<br />

bull-run between 2003 and 2008 hit<br />

agriculture significantly, given its high<br />

contribution to the production cost per<br />

unit in this sector because of fertilizers,<br />

transportation and other industrial<br />

agribusiness operations. Cereal stocks<br />

fell to their lowest levels since the early<br />

1980s. And, specifically in the United<br />

States, growing proportions of the corn<br />

crop were channeled into the production<br />

of ethanol for use in transport.<br />

On the demand side, experts identified<br />

a structural shift in global patterns,<br />

with higher consumption of animal<br />

protein (itself raised through animal<br />

feed based on basic grains) in the big<br />

emerging market countries of Asia<br />

and increasing demand for biofuels to<br />

reduce carbon emissions. The latter<br />

2011–2012 29

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