ActionAid was founded as an international NGO in 1972, working to reduce poverty and promote human rights. Its headquarters are in Johannesburg, South Africa and under one of its main areas of concern, ‘land and climate’, it has produced a number of reports related to food security. After severe food shortages at the end of…   Read more

Though many people understand how buffer stocks can reduce price volatility, they sometimes worry about how even a good system might be manipulated by interest groups. It’s all very well, they say, to release reserves when prices are high and replenish them when they are low, but who is to define ‘high’ and ‘low’? The…   Read more

When people talk about food buffer stocks, they tend to think about them in the context of a single country. The idea is to have more stable prices by releasing grain (or another food commodity) onto the market when prices are high and replenishing the buffer stock by buying grain when prices are low. This…   Read more

Last year a team of ‘IMF experts’ published a report intended to help member countries deal with the economic effects of COVID-19. One of the reports, published on June 29th, concerned ‘food markets during COVID-19’ and came out against using food buffer stocks to stabilize prices. It claimed that they ‘carry a large fiscal cost…   Read more

  Nearly two decades ago, in 2002, several newspapers reported that the IMF had recommended the sale of Malawi’s strategic grain reserve just before the country suffered a catastrophic crop failure during which people died from starvationAccording to The Guardian the IMF representative in Malawi, Girma Begashaw, insisted that no such recommendation had been given.…   Read more

In July 2020 the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, presented a report to the UN General Assembly in line with a resolution on the Right to Food passed by the UN in 2018. The resolution was looking forward to achieving food security and sustainable agriculture by 2030. However, as with all…   Read more

Marco Polo (1254-1324) was a Venetian merchant who travelled through much of Asia in the late thirteenth century.  As with any tale from history, there are those who are sceptical about the veracity of his stories and even about whether he went to China at all (he doesn’t mention the Great Wall, the sceptics complain).…   Read more

The President of the World Bank, David Malpass, published a blog on February 1st about the lack of food security in the world. The blog had previously been an article in The Guardian. One sentence stood out: ‘The time is long overdue to shift to practices that safeguard and increase food and nutrition in ways…   Read more

“Resilience requires buffer and buffer can look wasteful until the moment when it isn’t.“ These words were uttered by Sir Simon Stevens, Chief Executive of the National Health Service, England before the UK parliament’s Health Committee on 26 January 2021. He was referring to vaccines, making the point that a buffer stock of an essential…   Read more