 One of the things we found out that we probably should have known was that the price fluctuations in a given country frequently exceeds the price fluctuations in the world market. What governments in most countries are trying to do is to stabilize food prices because food prices are so important politically in countries where food occupies a very large share of the expenditure of the consumer. So it isn't unusual for a low-income consumer in a developing country to spend more than half of its money on food, whether that's food they produce themselves or food that they buy. So when food prices fluctuate, their real purchasing power fluctuates and governments don't like fluctuating purchasing power in the population because that creates instability and if it really gets bad, riots, smashing windows and burning cars. So governments are very concerned about maintaining stable food prices. When food prices fluctuate in the international market, therefore, they try to protect their domestic market. They either remove import tariffs if it's an importing country which would lower the food prices domestically or they put an export restriction, maybe an export ban on food if it's an exporting country. In the case of the former, many of the African countries removed import taxes which brought down the price of imported food when, in fact, the world market price went up. In the case of the latter where they put restrictions on exports, India and China managed to maintain their domestic prices almost unchanged during a period of time when the international prices, and I'm talking about prices of cereals, of grains, when the international prices went up dramatically, they didn't really change in the domestic market of India and China. Why? Because those two countries manipulated their trade policy in such a way that there was virtually no transmission of price fluctuations in the international market into those domestic markets. You also have cases where the country simply kept an open market. Brazil and South Africa for some of the grains said, look, we'll just let the prices transmit into domestic markets. If the price goes up in the world market, so be it, it will go up in our domestic market. What they then did to protect those groups that would otherwise cause violence and riots in the street, they would compensate them either by targeted food subsidies, reducing the food prices, using fiscal, using money from government, or they would transfer cash so they could afford to buy the food. So the countries behaved very differently. And what was interesting in this study was to understand why they behaved differently. And that goes right back to the question of the various interest groups and how much power does each of those interest groups have and what is the agenda of each of the interest groups. And in South Africa and Brazil, large farmers had a major say in the matter. So when food prices went up internationally, those large farmer associations say, wait a minute, just let the prices go up, that would be fine for us. Whereas in other countries, consumers had more power than the farmers and the consumers would say, look, if you don't control that price increase, we're going to come after you and we're going to threaten your legitimacy. You may not stay in power very long after we've finished with you unless you control those prices. So what the government did, among other things, was they had targeted income transfers when the food prices went up. They targeted income transfers or food subsidies to the groups that they were most scared of. Those were not the groups that were the most seriously affected. You would think from a more ethical perspective, they would compensate the poorest of the poor who may spend as much as 70% of their income on food, compensate them to protect them from the negative impact of food price increases. They didn't. They were targeting the transfers on the lower middle class in urban areas because that was the group that would instigate trouble for the government. That was the group that either went to the streets themselves or paid somebody to go on the street and demonstrate or do things that were worse. Governments were very concerned about that. Whether they were democratically elected or they were self-appointed, those governments had priority number one, protect our legitimacy. That wasn't what they said. They said our priority number one is to protect food security, meaning that everybody has access to enough food and if that is threatened, we will compensate the people who can no longer afford to buy the food they need. That's what they said. That's not what they did. Absolutely. We have seen an urban bias in food policy for a very long time. It was a lot worse 40 years ago than it was 20 years ago, but since the world food crisis beginning in 2007, the urban bias has been more pronounced, meaning that governments are much more concerned about making the urban population happy than making the rural population happy. Now, there are exceptions to that. China is an exception. China is very concerned about stability in rural areas. They have introduced policies for the benefit of the rural poor, but in most countries there is a bias towards benefiting the urban poor. That means, for example, food subsidies, access to food at lower prices than what the market would offer. We saw an increase in that bias towards urban areas, precisely for the reason that, or at least partly for the reason that the rural poor are less likely to get organized and threaten the government. Each unit in government, being a ministry or some other unit, would have its own agenda, would have its own goals, and it will try to pursue those goals by whatever means are available to the ministry. Now, some governments have a very strong leader who is actually capable of keeping these various goals and approaches together. In other governments, that's not so. Ministry of Agriculture would have one goal and would try to achieve that goal, whereas other ministries, the Ministry of Health, for example, would have a different goal and would try to pursue it in a different way. What happened to the extent that we could get the information in these debates within the government itself, you frequently had some very heated arguments as to what the policy intervention should be. What we may see from the outside is a government that makes a decision. It looks like a unitary government making a decision. Everything is beautiful. Well, what happens in reality is there's a lot of fighting or arguments going on before you arrive at that. In governments that didn't really were cohesive, you could end up with policies that were contradictory. So one ministry would be capable of putting in place of implementing one policy and another ministry would implement another one. You saw some of that as well. Most governments respond within a very short time horizon. And it is possible that a government will think to the extent that governments think, but the policy makers will expect that they can survive until the next election or the next appointment without having another price spike, so therefore there's no need for making the investments. But we have to be very clear about the difference between investing in a sustainable improvement such as investing in rural infrastructure, in roads, in institutions, in irrigation facilities, in energy, electricity and telephones and all of that. That's investing in a sustainable future where as a subsidy or some panic solution of the kind that took place is not an investment. It's money spent and it really has no long-term positive effect. So the enlightened government will use this current window of opportunity where we don't have huge price increases to prepare for the next one. But it does take a somewhat longer time horizon than most governments have. But it's no different from investing in education. You invest in kids education, it's not going to have a payoff for many years to come. You invest in agricultural research, it takes a while for that to work. That is why governments in most cases would much rather give a fertilizer subsidy because that has an effect next year than making investments in ag research which may have an effect 20 years from now. But those very short-term solutions are extremely expensive and they're not sustainable. The evidence base for understanding how the policy process works is rather deficient. But the evidence base that the policy makers need to make the right policy decisions is extremely weak. We really need to help governments whether it's in a developing country or a high-income country. Governments need help in setting up institutions that will generate the context-specific knowledge that policy makers need. Now there are people who argue that policy makers are irrational and they do not respond to evidence. They are wrong, those who argue that. Policy makers respond to evidence but they may not respond in the way that we think they should or that we think is rational. But they have their goals and they pursue those goals using the best evidence available. That is why organizations such as WIDA is very important in generating or helping to generate the capacity that's necessary to develop that context-specific knowledge. Without that knowledge policy makers will still make decisions they have to but then they may not make the right ones as far as they themselves are concerned. Certainly the best we can do as researchers is to help governments understand the consequences of alternative action. Make that available to all of the stakeholder groups and say, okay, if the outcome of the policy process is this policy intervention, here are the likely consequences for all of the groups that the government or the society is interested in. If however you choose this other route, this other policy intervention, you have a different set of outcomes. That I think is what WIDA should be doing. That is what the International Food Policy Research Institute has been doing over many years. That's what I think some of the university economists should be doing, policy analysts. We shouldn't tell governments what to do. We should tell governments here's what happens if you do this versus doing something else.