بهره وری نیروی کار کشاورزی، قیمت مواد غذایی و تاثیرات توسعه پایدار و شاخص ها

In the last few years high and unstable food and agricultural commodity prices and concerns about population growth, increasing per capita food demands and environmental constraints have pushed agriculture and food production up national and international political, policy and research agendas. Drawing on both theory and empirical evidence, this paper argues that fundamental impacts of links between agricultural productivity sustainability and real food price changes are often overlooked in current policy analysis. This is exacerbated by a lack of relevant and accessible indicators for monitoring agricultural productivity sustainability and real food prices. Two relatively simple and widely applicable sets of indicators are proposed for use in policy development and monitoring. Historical series of these indices are estimated for selected countries, regions and the world. Their strengths, weaknesses and potential value are then discussed in the context of the need for better sustainable agricultural development and food security indicators in any post 2015 successors to the current MDGs.

Recent years have seen increasing average food prices, severe food price shocks (in 2008 and 2010/2011), and increasing concerns about the impacts of food prices shocks, high food prices and food price volatility on poor and food insecure people. This paper reviews historical changes in staple food prices (in terms of international grain prices) and then uses basic microeconomic development theory to consider agricultural productivity and food price impacts on and roles in development and poverty reduction. This provides a foundation for subsequent design of indicators for monitoring agricultural productivity change and food price changes relative to the real incomes of poor people. Historical series of two sets of indicators are estimated for selected countries, regions and the world, and their strengths, weaknesses and potential value discussed. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges posed by this analysis in the context of growing threats to global food availability and the relevance of the proposed indicators to debates on new international development goals to follow the Millennium Development Goals after 2015.

This paper has examined the roles of falling food prices relative to wages in wider economic growth and development. These roles have a long history in in the development economics literature, but their consideration seems to have been surprisingly absent from recent debates about the impacts of high food prices on development (impacts which had commonly been seen as beneficial, through their role in stimulating research investment). The need for low food prices to stimulate wider economic growth highlights the importance of raising the productivity of agricultural labour in the economy, particularly in smallholder agriculture with its critical but temporary and challenging potential for broad based growth. However the need for increases in agricultural labour productivity has also been widely overlooked in recent policy, and there are considerable challenges in raising agricultural labour productivity. These arise not only in the need for governments and the global community to recognise the public good characteristics of agricultural labour productivity and invest in agriculture despite (indeed to encourage) low prices: environmental challenges require a simultaneous fall in fossil fuel and material inputs which have historically been a major contributor to rising land and labour productivity. Related to this is a need for indicators that provide better measures of different types of agricultural productivity and of food price impacts on particularly poorer people. Two sets of indicators proposed in the final sections of the paper go some way to meeting this need. These could be widely implemented, for example supporting new international development goals when the current Millennium Development Goals expire in 2015. They would require limited further development and cost, since many of their basic elements are already found within national and international data systems, but they could support important improvements in these systems. Further challenges in agricultural policy, and in the development of related indicators, need to be addressed in, for example, links between agriculture and food systems on the one hand with energy, water use, climate change, land institutions and access, and micro-nutrient deficiencies and diet related non-communicable diseases.