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The secret report about food prices?

A note on rising food prices;

Summary: The rapid rise in food prices has been a burden on the poor in developing countries, who spend roughly half of their household incomes on food. This paper examines the factors behind the rapid increase in internationally traded food prices since 2002 and estimates the contribution of various factors such as the increased production of biofuels from food grains and oilseeds, the weak dollar, and the increase in food production costs due to higher energy prices. It concludes that the most important factor was the large increase in biofuels production in the U.S. and the EU. Without these increases, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably, oilseed prices would not have tripled, and price increases due to other factors, such as droughts, would have been more moderate. Recent export bans and speculative activities would probably not have occurred because they were largely responses to rising prices. While it is difficult to compare the results of this study with those of other studies due to differences in methodologies, time periods and prices considered, many other studies have also recognized biofuels production as a major driver of food prices. The contribution of biofuels to the rise in food prices raises an important policy issue, since much of the increase was due to EU and U.S. government policies that provided incentives to biofuels production, and biofuels policies which subsidize production need to be reconsidered in light of their impact on food prices.

Headline of the Day

World leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis

The following headline appears too suspicious-
G8 says committed to fulfilling Africa aid pledge

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IMF and World Bank compete for attention;
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Another Band Aid?

World Bank Launches $1.2 Billion Fast-Track Facility for Food Crisis

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Trust the development experts – all 7bn of them By William Easterly;

The report of the World Bank Growth Commission, led by Nobel laureate Michael Spence, was published last week. After two years of work by the commission of 21 world leaders and experts, an 11- member working group, 300 academic experts, 12 workshops, 13 consultations, and a budget of $4m, the experts’ answer to the question of how to attain high growth was roughly: we do not know, but trust experts to figure it out.

This conclusion is fleshed out with statements such as: “It is hard to know how the economy will respond to a policy, and the right answer in the present moment may not apply in the future.” Growth should be directed by markets, except when it should be directed by governments.

My students at New York University would have been happy to supply statements like these to the World Bank for a lot less than $4m.

Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the “development expert” paradigm that has governed the west’s approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for “development experts” to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have said it.

Jagdish Bhagwati on Food Prices

Jagdish Bhagwati on Food Prices;



Bhagwati and Sachs on the food crisis

Tea- Fact of the Day

World tea production continued to grow in 2006. The annual growth rate was more than 3 % to reach an estimated 3.6 million tonnes. The expansion was mainly due to record crops in China, Viet Nam and India.

The very latest figures put world black tea production at 2.5 million tonnes as compared to 968 000 tonnes for green tea. FAO projections to 2017 indicate that world green tea production is expected to grow at a considerably faster rate than black tea, 4.5 % annually compared to 1.9 % for black tea. The projections reflect the growth in China where the programme for production expansion through rehabilitation, replanting and some conversion is expected to continue to 2017.

The level of world tea consumption in 2006 was roughly equal to production. But its growth rate was only one percent, a slowdown from the annual average of 2.7 % growth over the previous decade. Per capita consumption in the major tea producing countries lags behind, in spite of their strong economic growth. Russians consume 1.26 kg per year and the British 2.2 kg per year but in India tea consumption is only 0.65 kg per head per year and in China it is only 0.53 kg per year.

-Intergovernmental meeting on tea

The Perfect Storm

Safia Ali, mother of five, has not eaten in seven days. Her 1-year old son, Farhan, has fallen ill.

The consensus now is that all the same elements of the early 1990s — high-intensity conflict, widespread displacement and drought — are lining up again, and at a time of the biggest spike in global food prices in more than 30 years. The United Nations says 2.6 million Somalis need assistance and the number could soon swell to 3.5 million, nearly half the estimated population. If there is excellent rain or a sudden peace, the crisis may ease. But weather projections and even the rosiest political forecasts do not predict that.

-Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa

NAMA

A simple guide — NAMA Negotiations

Non-agricultural market access negotiations

Assorted on Food Prices

"We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It's as stark as that."

- Bob Zoellick

Rising Food Prices and Public Policy-BECKER

Addendum on Rising Food Prices-Becker

Food Prices: the Debate

Gary Becker Blames Food Inflation on Biofuel Policies

Rising Food Prices: What Should Be Done?

Dawe of UN Sees Impact of Rice Prices on Civil Unrest

Food Prices and Supply

The silent tsunami

The new face of hunger

Reviving the ration card

Commodity arbitrage

Food prices

Food prices and poverty

Rising Food Prices

Getting what you pay for: food & energy prices

Afghanistan swaps heroin for wheat

Race and farming

The struggle of black farmers in America has been captured in vivid black and white moments by documentary photographer, John Ficara. Black owned farms peaked in the early 1920s with an estimated total of 15 million acres and over 900,000 farmers. Today there are only 2.2 million acres owned by black farmers. These farmers are losing their land three times faster than white family farmers and a recent study by the university of Michigan predicts that within the next ten years there will be virtually no black owned farms.

The latest IMF Survey

IMF Survey: global imbalances and IMF's role,Africa’s Improved Debt Outlook, Nigeria: Reforms Key to Success, Burkina Faso’s Cotton Crisis, Ghana and Inflation Targeting, Iraq Makes Progress, Egypt’s Reforms Spur Growth, Asian Trade and Baltics: Avoiding Boom-Bust

Potato Fact of the Day

In 1596 the English accidentally got their first introduction to the potato, when Sir Francis Drake set sail for England after having conquered the Caribbean regions, wresting them away from the Spanish. He took some potatoes for the trip. He is said to have stopped over at Virginia to pick up some homesick British soldiers, one of whom took a sample of this plant to a botanist friend, John Gerard. This botanist introduced the potato to the world, as a product of Virginia in 1597. The fact was that it wasn’t until the seventeenth century that potatoes arrived on American soil!! When it did, it was due to the Irishmen who had settled in New Hampshire.

The fact was that in Europe, only the Irish were willing to brave all the rumors surrounding this little veggie, and still eat it. Many believed it was poisonous because it belonged to the same botanical family as belladonna, that it caused leprosy because it had given a rash once, that it was not mentioned in the bible hence was unholy, and all sorts of other ridiculous stories. It was only the Irish who favored it, the tuber grew well in their climate and also provided the nutrition the growing population in Ireland needed. It was also considered an aphrodisiac, but that didn’t bother them!! In fact, it was so identified with the Irish that in 1733, the English seedsman Stephen Switzer summed up popular opinion of the potato as "that which was heretofore reckon'd a food fit only for Irishmen and clowns."

In 1588 the potato had arrived in Germany but was considered fit only for consumption of prisoners. Only in 1744 King William ordered peasants to plant them, in order to save them from famine, that it got acceptance as regular food.

It was, however, in Germany that potatoes got their best ally to, as Antoine August Parmentier, a French Chemist who had lived on potatoes while held captive during the seven-year war. When he returned home, he used all his PR powers to gain acceptance for the humble tuber and succeeded. He published a thesis on "Inquiry into nourishing vegetables that at times of necessity could be substituted for ordinary food" in 1773, and also brought a bouquet of potato flowers to King Louis XVI’s birthday party. The king was gracious enough to place a flower in his lapel and his wife; Queen Marie Antoinette wore them in her hair. The Potato had arrived.

The smart chemist decided to continue his potato popularizing activity, throwing parties where up to twenty dishes were made of potatoes, and also obtained permission to plant an acre with potato plants. The real strategy was yet to come. The acre was fastidiously guarded during the day and left unsecured during the night. Curiosities were aroused as to why such an ordinary field needs to be guarded and sure enough, thefts of the plant became regular during the nights. Soon enough, the potato found its way throughout the French countryside. By 1813, the potato had gained acceptance in Scotland, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Thanks to the French, potatoes were finally deemed chic enough to eat.

The potato was such an important part of the Irish diet that almost 20% of their population was wiped out in the middle of the seventeenth century, when a potato crop failed. In 1845, another potato famine hit Ireland and this time they migrated in great numbers to the United States.

-To Fry or To Chip

The delinking of world growth and commodity price inflation

Jeffrey Frankel asks- How to explain commodity prices up while the economy turns down? ;

Since last summer the US economy has slowed down noticeably, and is probably entering a recession. Despite talk of decoupling, it is clear that other countries are also slowing down at least to some extent. In its most recent forecast, the IMF World Economic Outlook revised downward the growth rate for virtually every region, including China. The overall global growth rate for 2008 has been marked down by 1.1% (from 5.2 % in July 2007, just before the sub-prime mortgage crisis hit, to 4.1 % as of January 29, 2008). And prospects continue to deteriorate. Yet commodity prices have found their second wind over precisely this period! Up some 25% or more since August 2007, by a number of indices. So much for the growth explanation.

Corn price inflation hits the pheasant hunters hard

BRITAIN'S pheasants are enjoying a peaceful few months after the end of the shooting season on February 1st. Not so the country squires who pay to have them lovingly nurtured ahead of the avian equivalent of the Somme next autumn. If their hobby was already an expensive one, it has become even more so with corn prices rising as fast as a bird out of the cover.

The problem is that pheasants, like all other creatures, have to eat. “The shoot finances were hammered last season by the large increase in the price of corn from which all shoots have obviously suffered,” writes one manager, informing clients of an increase in the daily cost, per gun, from £795 ($1,610) to £845.

Only around 40% of the pheasants end up being shot; the rest wander off or get eaten by foxes. But the shoot managers, who buy the birds at around eight weeks old, have to feed the lot. And Charles Nodder, a consultant to the Game Farmers' Association, says the industry has also been hit by the higher cost of fuel to keep the chicks warm.

If the shooting lobby is to be believed, their sport is a surprisingly big business, contributing £1.6 billion to British GDP and creating 70,000 jobs. Members of shooting parties pay around £30-35 a bird to test their aim (though, once killed, the wholesale meat value is well under £1). Luckily for the shooting syndicates, a price rise of 5-6% is not likely to put off the bond traders and hedge-fund managers who have become devotees of the sport. Like the pheasants, they are ripe for a plucking.

-Corn prices hit with both barrels

Operationalizing 'Agriculture for Development '

A recent event from the World Bank-

Operationalizing the WDR08: Agriculture for Development

The World Bank’s annual World Development Report (WDR) is a comprehensive study on the economic, social and environmental state of the world. Each year, the report provides an in depth analysis focused on a specific aspect of development. For the first time in 25 years, the WDR addressed issues on agriculture and development. On February 19, 2008, major contributors to the report met at the World Bank in Washington, DC and presented their findings. They shared their recommendations on how the Bank might best operationalize the WDR, noting that one of the more significant challenges the Bank faces is an increasingly aggressive and competitive global market environment.

The panel was moderated by Kristalina Georgieva, Director for Strategy & Operations, Sustainable Development Network (SDN). Panel members included Juergen Voegele, former Director for Agriculture in the Central Network, Shantayanan Devarajan, Chief Economist for South Asia, Derek Byerlee, Sr. Advisor Africa Region and the lead on the World Development Report Team, and Alan Gelb , Director of Development Policy, DEC.

Gelb, spoke of the positive response to the WDR. He attributed it to the Bank’s goal of achieving the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG): eradicating poverty and hunger. If this MDG is to be met, he said, there must be agricultural progress in the rural areas, where 75% of the poor live and work.

Byerlee discussed feedback from the dissemination process. He attributed the recent interest in agri-business to the increasingly high prices for many agricultural commodities. He also noted an increased and aggressive interest by the private sector. Derrick presented his ideas on the operational aspects of the report, his vision and the accompanying challenges. The report findings revealed a significant shift toward increased investment in agriculture, especially in countries such as Malawi, Kenya, Vietnam, and India. He emphasized the need for better understanding of the political economy surrounding agricultural policy decisions. One of the biggest challenges will be developing the capacity to implement complex and multi-sectoral agricultural programs, Byerlee said.

Devarajan said the WDR provides a useful framework for improving Agricultural Productivity Growth (AGP) in South Asia. He identified AGP as a key problem for operationalization of the WDR in South Asia. While the country has been growing at 6 to 7% a year, poverty has not declined. He highlighted what he sees as barriers toward improving agricultural productivity.

Voegele, quizzed the audience and asked if there were country directors present, if anyone had discussed the WDR with a country director and of those present, and how many had read the report. Voegele asked these questions in order to emphasize the need for staff to more aggressively disseminate the messages of the report. He stated that convincing country directors would one of the more significant challenges. A questions and comments session followed and topics for the second session were introduced.

How do you 'operationalize' a report in the World Bank?

Farmers are having a good time

Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics.

Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world’s developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards.

The high growth rate means hundreds of millions of people are, for the first time, getting access to the basics of life, including a better diet. That jump in demand is helping to drive up the prices of agricultural commodities.

Farmers the world over are producing flat-out. American agricultural exports are expected to increase 23 percent this year to $101 billion, a record. The world’s grain stockpiles have fallen to the lowest levels in decades.

“Everyone wants to eat like an American on this globe,” said Daniel W. Basse of the AgResource Company, a Chicago consultancy. “But if they do, we’re going to need another two or three globes to grow it all.”

In contrast to a run-up in the 1990s, investors this time are betting — as they buy and sell contracts for future delivery of food commodities — that scarcity and high prices will last for years.

If that comes to pass, it is likely to present big problems in managing the American economy. Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel inflation reminiscent of the 1970s.

And the increases could become an even bigger problem overseas. The increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries.

In the long run, the food supply could grow. More land may be pulled into production, and outdated farming methods in some countries may be upgraded. Moreover, rising prices could force more people to cut back. The big question is whether such changes will be enough to bring supply and demand into better balance.

“People are trying to figure out, is this a new era?” said Joseph Glauber, chief economist for the United States Department of Agriculture. “Are prices going to be high forever?”

At a moment when much of the country is contemplating recession, farmers are flourishing. The Agriculture Department forecasts that farm income this year will be 50 percent greater than the average of the last 10 years. The flood of money into American agriculture is leading to rising land values and a renewed sense of optimism in rural America.

“All of a sudden farmers are more in control, which is a weird position for them,” said Brian Sorenson of the Northern Crops Institute in Fargo, N.D. “Everyone’s knocking at their door, saying, ‘Grow this, grow that.’ ”

Mr. Miller’s family has worked the Great Plains for more than a century. One afternoon early last month, he turned on the computer in his combination office and laundry room to see what commodity prices were up to.

“Oh, my goodness, look at that,” Mr. Miller said. Barley was $6.40 a bushel, approaching a price that would tempt him to plant more. Soybeans were $12.79 a bushel, up from $8.50 in August.

The frozen earth outside was only a few weeks from coming to life, but Mr. Miller was happily uncertain about what to plant. Last year, the decision was easy for Mr. Miller and everyone else: prices of corn were high because of new government mandates for production of ethanol, a motor fuel. This year, so many crops look like good bets, and there is so little land on which to plant them.

“I’m debating between spring wheat, durum wheat, canola, malting barley, confection sunflowers, oil sunflowers, soybeans, flax and corn,” Mr. Miller said.

The biggest blemish on this winter of joy is that farmers’ own costs are rising rapidly. Expenses for the diesel fuel used to run tractors and combines and for the fertilizer essential to modern agriculture have soared. Mr. Miller does not just want high prices; he needs them to pay his bills.

Until recently, he could expect around $3 a bushel for his wheat — far less than his parents and grandparents received, when inflation is taken into account. Consumption in the United States was dropping as Americans shunned carbohydrates. The export market, while healthy, faced competition.

Now prices have more than tripled, partly because of a drought in Australia and bad harvests elsewhere and also because of unslaked global demand for crackers, bread and noodles. In seven of the last eight years, world wheat consumption has outpaced production. Stockpiles are at their lowest point in decades.

Around the world, wheat is becoming a precious commodity. In Pakistan, thousands of paramilitary troops have been deployed since January to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Malaysia, trying to keep its commodities at home, has made it a crime to export flour and other products without a license. Consumer groups in Italy staged a widely publicized (if also widely disregarded) one-day pasta strike last fall.

In the United States, the price of dry pasta has risen 20 percent since October, according to government data. Flour is up 19 percent since last summer. Over all, food and beverage prices are rising 4 percent a year, the fastest pace in nearly two decades.

The American Bakers Association last month took the radical step of suggesting that American exports be curtailed to keep wheat at home, though the group later backed off.

-A Global Need for Grain That Farms Can’t Fill

Another Ethanol Fact of the Day

A typical ethanol factory producing 50m gallons of biofuels a year needs about 500 gallons of water a minute. Most of that goes into the boiling and cooling process, which is similar to making beer. Some water is lost through evaporation in the cooling tower and in waste discharge. All this is putting a heavy burden on aquifers in some corn-growing areas.

-Ethanol and water

Food Prices and Food Tariffs

A number of food importing countries have started to lower their import tariffs, to try to offset the impact of high international prices on their domestic consumers. And then on the other side, a number of food exporting countries are trying to make sure that more of their food stays at home and keeps prices low, so their putting on export taxes to stop their farm exporters from selling abroad, and keep them selling domestically.

...European Union just eliminated all tariffs on cereals, in an effort to stop food prices from rising so rapidly in Europe. India, for example, halved its tariffs on palm oil prices. Cooking oil is very important to a lot of people in India, so in lots of countries around the world, you're seeing very significant changes in their policies.

...the Chinese government is trying to get their farmers to keep more of their goods at home and sell it into domestic markets, and of course what that does is it makes international prices rise even more, because the normal impact of higher prices, which is to get more supply into the international market, is being offset by these domestic policies, and China isn't alone. Argentina has done exactly the same with beef exports. They've stopped beef exports, forcing Argentinean producers to sell beef in their domestic markets, and temporarily, that has kept beef prices in Argentina low, but in the long run, there is a danger that it could damage the beef industry.

-Countries alter food prices with tariffs

Farmers want to sell water instead of growing crops!

With water becoming increasingly precious in California, a rising number of farmers figure they can make more money by selling their water than by actually growing something.

Because farmers get their water at subsidized rates, some of them see financial opportunity this year in selling their allotments to Los Angeles and other desperately thirsty cities across Southern California, as well as to other farms.

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer who grows rice, wheat and other crops in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley.

Instead of sowing in April, Rolen plans to let 100 of his 250 acres of white rice lie fallow and sell his irrigation water on the open market, where it could fetch up to three times the normal price.

What effect these deals will have on produce prices remains to be seen, because the negotiations are still going on and it is not yet clear how many acres will be taken out of production. But California grows most of the nation's winter vegetables and about 80 percent of the world's almonds, and is the No. 2 rice state, behind Arkansas.

Environmental restrictions, booming demand for water, and persistent drought along the Colorado River have combined to create one of the worst water shortages in California in the past decade, and prices are shooting up in response.

The would-be water sellers include farmers who grow rice, cantaloupes and tomatoes around Sacramento and the San Joaquin Valley. Rice, in particular, requires a lot of water; the fields have to be flooded.

The farmers looking to buy water are generally farther south in the San Joaquin Valley and the Los Angeles area and grow such crops as pistachios, almonds and grapes. Because of the heavy capital investment they made in their trees and vines, these farmers cannot afford to stop irrigating their crops and let them die. In contrast, rice, melons and tomatoes are planted anew each year.

Individual farmers don't actually sell their water themselves. Instead, their local water districts represent them in negotiations with other water agencies.

"It's been a good decade since there's been this much interest in buying and selling water on the open market," said Jack King of the California Farm Bureau Federation. "We're prepared to see significant fallowing in several key parts of the state."

As for what this will mean for the cost of food at the supermarket, "it's still too premature to say where prices will settle, but I can say that virtually every agricultural district in the Sacramento Valley is thinking about selling their water this year," said Laura King Moon, assistant general manager of the State Water Contractors Association, which represents 29 water agencies.

Water from Northern California rivers irrigates central California's farm fields and keeps faucets flowing in the Los Angeles area. But it must be shipped south through a network of pumps, pipes and aqueducts, and that system recently developed a kink when a federal judge ordered new restrictions on pumping to save threatened fish.

At the same time, Southern California's other main source of water, the Colorado River, is in its eighth year of drought.

Because of the resulting shortages, Long Beach cannot run fountains, and restaurants there are not allowed to serve customers a glass of water unless they ask for it. Near Bakersfield, in central California, almond and pistachio growers will have to perform triage of sorts and decide which of their nut trees can be saved. And cities across California are drawing down underground supplies of water rather than buying it.

Water on California's open market typically sells for $50 per acre-foot in wet years. But now it is expected to go for as much as $200. Farmers, however, pay $30 to $60, rates that are set under state and federal policy. (An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre to a depth of one foot.)

-Calif. Farmers Want to Sell Water

The Story of Busunju-Uganda

THE VILLAGE: Busunju


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A Dying Breed;

GERSHOM MUGIRA COMES from a long line of cattle-keepers. His people, the Bahima, are thought to have migrated into the hilly grasslands of western Uganda more than a thousand years ago, alongside a hardy breed of longhorns known as the Ankole. For centuries, man and beast subsisted there in a tight symbiotic embrace. Mugira’s nomadic ancestors wandered in search of fresh pasture for their cattle, which in turn provided them with milk. It is only within the last few generations that most Bahima have accepted the concept of private property. Mugira’s family lives on a 500-acre ranch, and one sunny day in November, the wiry 26-year-old showed me around, explaining, with some sadness but more pragmatism, why the Ankole breed that sustained his forebears for so many generations is now being driven to extinction.

As we walked down the sloped valley path that led to a watering hole, we found a few cows lolling beneath a flat-topped acacia. They looked like the kind of cattle you might encounter in Wisconsin: plump and hornless creatures with dappled black-and-white coats. Mugira, a high-school graduate, was wearing a pair of fashionably baggy jeans and spiffy white sneakers. To a modern African like himself, he said, the most desirable cattle were the American type: the Holsteins.

In recent decades, global trade, sophisticated marketing, artificial insemination and the demands of agricultural economics have transformed the Holstein into the world’s predominant dairy breed. Indigenous animals like East Africa’s sinewy Ankole, the product of centuries of selection for traits adapted to harsh conditions, are struggling to compete with foreign imports bred for maximal production. This worries some scientists. The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages. But farmers like Mugira say they can’t afford to wait for science. And so, on the African savanna, a competition for survival is underway.

Mugira was just about to tell me what made the Holsteins so valuable when suddenly, Dr. Grace Asiimwe, a veterinarian and my guide through western Uganda’s ranchlands, shouted, “The Ankoles are coming!”...

“You know, in Uganda, we have to look for survival of the fittest,” Mugira said once he finished sorting out the confusion. “These ones, they are the fittest,” he went on to say, gesturing toward his Holsteins. In physical terms, there was really no contest between the tough Ankoles and the fussy foreign cattle, which were always hungry and often sick. But the foreigners possessed arguably the single most important adaptive trait for livestock: they made money. Holsteins are lactating behemoths. In an African setting, a good one can produce 20 or 30 times as much milk as an Ankole.

Mugira explained that, unlike most of his peers, he was holding onto some longhorns, mostly for sentimental reasons. His father, who died in 2003, loved his Ankoles. One of them wandered over and nuzzled Mugira, who placed his hand gently on its forehead. In the days before Christianity arrived in this part of Africa, the Bahima made offerings of milk to herdsman gods. Their language contains a vast catalog of cattle names, which refer to characteristics like color and hide pattern. This cow was called Kiroko, indicating it had some white patches on its face. The ideal Ankole, Mugira told me, has a lustrous brown coat and gleaming horns that curve out and then inward, forming a shape like a lyre. “They are naturally good,” Mugira said. “They are beautiful. In our culture we preferred these. But then we developed another culture, from Western culture.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations, recently reported that at least 20 percent of the world’s estimated 7,600 livestock breeds are in danger of extinction. Experts are warning of a potential “meltdown” in global genetic diversity. Yet the plight of the Ankole illustrates the difficulty of balancing the conflicting goals of animal conservation and human prosperity. An estimated 70 percent of the world’s rural poor, some 630 million people, derive a substantial percentage of their income from livestock. Increase the productivity of these animals, development specialists say, and you improve dire living standards. The World Bank recently published a report saying it was time to place farming “afresh at the center of the development agenda.” Highly productive livestock breeds, the World Bank asserts, are playing an important role in alleviating poverty.

“You do have local animals with various kinds of disease resistance and whatever other kinds of things you don’t want to do away with,” said Chris Delgado, an agriculture policy adviser at the World Bank. “But there’s a problem: They are kept by very poor people, and they don’t want to stay poor.”

Every cow in the world is the product of some human agency. The extinct feral ancestor of all cattle, the auroch, was a fearsome horned creature that could grow to be six feet tall. There are two theories about the taming of wild aurochs. The traditional view holds that it happened around 6000 B.C. in the Fertile Crescent. But recent archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that domestication may have first occurred in Africa 2,000 years earlier, in the then-lush plains of the eastern Sahara. Then, beginning around 2,000 years ago, Arab merchants introduced humped cattle of Indian origin to East Africa, which were crossed with the indigenous longhorns to produce breeds like the Ankole.

For millennia, changing a breed’s genetics through husbandry required a long trial-and-error process. But today it can happen in an evolutionary eye blink. Multinational breeding companies, many of them based in the United States, collect semen from prime bulls, freeze it and export it to the developing world. Official estimates say there are about three million Ankole cattle in Uganda and smaller populations in bordering nations. An unknown — though by all accounts large — percentage of them are in the process of being turned into something else. After one cross with a Holstein, the brown Ankole cow will produce a black calf with darkened horns. After two, the horns will shrink and a dappled coat will appear. The third generation will basically look like American dairy cattle. With each cross, the offspring will produce more milk. The World Bank estimates that 1.8 million small-scale farmers in East Africa are benefiting from such genetic changes to their cattle and that some 100 million cows and pigs are created through artificial insemination in poor countries each year. Those numbers substantially understate the extent of genetic interchange, because half the offspring produced by artificial insemination are male and spread their genes the old-fashioned way.

To see the evolution in Ugandan dairy cattle, I visited a farmer named Jackson Sezibwa, who lives down a reddish dirt path outside the central Ugandan town of Mukono. A weather-beaten man of 46, Sezibwa greeted me in a torn, muddy shirt. He showed me to the metal-roofed stall where he keeps his Holstein, Kevina.

Chris Blattman has good coverage of Ugandan politics and developments