The World Food Economy : A 40 Year Perspective on the Past , and a Look Forward
The book focuses on four main themes :
First is the complex role of markets . This is not the place to debate the role of capitalism as a system to organize our economic affairs . That debate is taking place in all rich countries , mostly because of the extreme inequalities in incomes generated by the financialization of capitalism . My concern is both narrower and broader . I want to focus on the role of markets in the economy because we may have to distinguish between the institutional framework in which these markets are set ( and the regulations that market participants face ) and the role that the markets themselves have to play .
Second is the importance of government policies . I learned about development when I first went to Indonesia , my Ph . D . still hot in my hand , in 1970 . My first appointment was as a junior advisor for the Harvard Advisory Group in the National Planning Agency . I had never taken a course in development . I am an economic historian by training , but I had analyzed commodity markets for 2 years on Wall Street . I certainly had a sense of how commodity markets work — I used to spend my lunch break watching the floor trading at the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange . At the time , of course , Indonesia was a major commodity exporter . So there was a need for some expertise on how world markets work for the things that Indonesia exported ( and the Indonesian government reluctantly agreed , because of my inexperience in developing countries ) to let me serve as a Harvard advisor on these commodities . But I was explicitly not supposed to work on food commodities .
You cannot sit in a national planning agency and think that government policy is irrelevant , even if the technical terms of reference are to study the behavior of world commodity markets . That is simply not the mindset . I was there for almost 2 years and then back two to three times a year for the next 40 years . For better or worse , I am conditioned to think it is important that the government do the right thing . That is the role of food policy analysis , and the role of government is really very important in this . Markets may do a lot of the work but governments have to intervene as well . But how , to do what ?
Third is the historical process of structural transformation . This has been in some sense my major academic role . I was Professor at Harvard for many years , Stanford and Cornell before that . I tried to understand this whole historical process of structural transformation — and especially the role of agriculture . I am a product of Alexander Gerschenkron , who lectured on economic backwardness in historical perspective . He thought agriculture was part of the problem in the development process . It was backward , it had people who weren ’ t educated — you couldn ’ t get them into the factories to work on time . Agriculture was the problem and industrialization — the faster the better — was the solution to modernization . His work focused almost entirely on the European experience . I was molded by that introduction to the historical process of thinking about the problems that come up during the development process . “ Constraints ” were simply opportunities for substituting other ways of solving a problem — not as barriers that meant a constraint that prevented doing anything . The European experience was seeing the constraint , then doing it some other way
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