Frontiers of Research on Foreign Assistance and Food Security Will Masters Professor and Chair, Department of Food and Nutrition Policy, Tufts University| sites.tufts.edu/willmasters C-FARE panel on Agricultural Development AAEA annual meetings, Seattle WA August 2012 Frontiers in all directions Research Problems Development outcomes Changed priorities for foreign aid Source: Calculated from OECD (2012), Official Bilateral Commitments by Sector, downloaded 8 August 2012 (http://stats.oecd.org/qwids). Agriculture includes forestry and fisheries. Values are billions of constant US dollars at 2010 prices (both axes). ODA commitments for health, agriculture and in total, What can we in agriculture learn from the rise in global health programs? Changed leadership in foreign aid Top 15 donors foreign aid commitments to African agriculture, Note: Exact amounts for BMGF have been obscured because methodology differs from that used by the DAC. Source: P. Pingali, G. Traxler and T. Nguyen (2011), Changing Trends in the Demand and Supply of Aid for Agriculture Development and the Quest for Coordination. Annual Meetings of the AAEA, July 2426, Chris Elias, M.D. Raj Shah, M.D. Jim Kim, M.D. The top three donors to African agriculture are led by health-care experts! AgricultureHealth Public support of private markets for most inputs and outputs, Collective action for public-domain resources Innovations Interventions Agriculture =?= Health Similar but different: Stylized innovations and interventions in agriculture and health Similar problems, different solutions Location-specific: Diverse agro-ecologies call for local trials from global crosses Disease-specific: Shared human biology calls for local access to global knowledge Delivered geographically: Market infrastructure and institutions Delivered individually: Non-market service delivery and behavior change Agriculture =?= Health Public domain knowledge, common property resources and other social structures Farm input suppliers Many diverse farmers Farm output marketers Many diverse food consumers and health-care beneficiaries Health care providers Health input suppliers Similar but different: Stylized industry structure ==> A very different research agenda! Frontiers of agri-health research Core hypotheses of integrated agriculture-nutrition-health programs Focus on: Service provision for individual beneficiaries Household production of nutritious/healthy things Advisory services and knowledge Focus off: Markets (no competition among alternative suppliers) Income (no separability between production & consumption) Information (no optimization by consumers) This is not crazy! It is well suited to the needs of health service providers