For those in the non-global health field, I am referring to food markets/bazaars, not stock markets or wall street. Why should you care about food markets in Africa and SE ASIA? Increasingly more people depend on purchased foods from the markets rather than self-production from their farms, and the vast majority of these are informal markets. If COVID-19 has taught us anything, these markets can have a global impact. More importantly, studying markets and supporting agricultural developments in Low- and Middle-Income Countries is in America’s best interests for the following reasons (as summarized by Dr.Thomas Jayne):
1) Increased demand for US agricultural products (listen to Dr.Jayne’s 6 min talk to see which African country is the 4th largest buyer of broiler meat from the US),
2) Greater peace and stability (which in the light of COVID-19 is going to be very critical),
3) Soft power (China is doing this now, see how in the talk by Dr.Jayne’s below).
Seriously, just listen to his excellent talk to the US Congress committee on Farm Bill (starts at 43 min, 6 min long).
For those in global health fields other than nutrition (infectious diseases, health systems, etc), there is a lot of great research coming out how markets are affecting diets and health outcomes in LMIC in both rural and urban settings. Especially given COVID-19, you can probably guess the restriction of movement, market access, agricultural services, has a lot of negative downstream effects on food insecurity, subsequently affecting adherence to treatments for HIV, TB, diabetes, etc. This webinar by Drs. Gerald Shively and Will Masters highlight the findings from studies looking at markets and infrastructure effects on diets and nutritional status pre-COVID-19.
Here are the key messages (taken verbatim):
- Isolation in all of its forms creates nutritional risks
- Markets and infrasturcture help mitigate these risks through higher household incomes, lower food prices and volatility, greater dietary diversity (with caveats), and potentially greater resilience.
So the question remains: how can people safely access markets under current COVID-19 conditions in LMIC?
- Re-shape food supply system, provide money, incentivize good practices, and access to credit/labor for farmers, and report price gounging.
- Reduce cost of communication so “people can stay connected to jobs and market” (wish we had this in the US too).
- Transparent data and monitoring of agricultural policies, trade, and regulations. This is the time to get efficient!
Stay tuned, my next blog post will be continuing this topic on markets, agricultural, and dietary transformation in LMIC and discussing findings from AGRA’s “The hidden middle” report.
On a personal note, I was pleasantly surprised how Dr.Gerald “showcased” sponsorship (see my previous blog post) and referred to the work of Dr.Nilupa Gunaratna in responding to questions from the chatbox (full disclosure, this is my awesome mentor). I thought there might be confirmation bias since I just blogged/learned about mentorship vs sponsorship. Nope, this is not the first time he’s done this. He’s referred to my work before and called me an “expert” on measuring market in an email 2 years ago (I nearly cried happy tears then because you know these things matter a lot to postdocs!). Anyways, I just want to highlight good practices when I see it.
