What's New

At first glance, it may seem that women in northern Mozambique might enjoy more power than women in other places, at least in the agricultural sector. In this region, land is often passed through matrilineal rather than patrilineal lines. And since the enactment of the Mozambique Land Law in 1997, one might expect that women here are better able to access land and retain control over land they bring with them into marriage.

Efforts to develop a work programme aimed at revamping the stalled Doha Round negotiations are ready to enter a “second stage,” WTO Director-General Roberto Azevêdo reported to the global trade body on Monday, after four months of preliminary consultations among members.

Since the poor spend a greater share of their household incomes on purchasing food, higher food prices must exacerbate poverty, right? Wrong . . . at least over the medium term. In my most recent paper, I find that the opposite is true: higher domestic food prices predict reductions in poverty. The methods in this paper are fairly simple. I take World Bank national poverty estimates for a broad swathe of countries and regress changes in poverty against changes in domestic food prices (the ratio of the food CPI to the non-food CPI).

Food prices spiked in March, according to the latest FAO Food Price Index, released this week. The Index rose 4.8 points from February and is at its highest level since May 2013. The increase is due largely to poor weather and continuing unrest in the Black Sea region. Cereal and sugar prices gained the most this month.

The March edition of the FAO Monthly News Report on Grains was released this week. The report covers ongoing global and regional trends in grain prices and policies. This month's report includes articles on the International Grain Council's prediction that the global grain harvest will fall next season, India's food storage limitations, Russia's slowing grain crop growth, and the threat of an export bottleneck due to the ongoing crisis in the Ukraine.