The Mexican tortilla crisis of 2007: the impacts of grain-price increases on food-production chains
This article examines the case of the Mexican ‘tortilla crisis’ of 2007. Drawing on reviews of literature and the media, key-informant interviews, and secondary databases, the authors explore the response of the Mexican maize–tortilla chain to a price shock. Price increases should theoretically be passed on to the consumer as a progressively less significant percentage of the overall price of value-added food products. However, in Mexico, price increases were magnified along the maize–tortilla production chain. This was due largely to asymmetries among segments of the chain, which conditioned the responses of industrial-scale corporations and small-scale family businesses. This case study suggests that, in order to understand the impacts of price-shocks on poor consumers, more detailed, country-level analyses of market chains and price-transmission structures are needed.
Transforming Governance In Telecoupled Food Systems
In this paper we analyze how new actors, interests, and resources become salient to food system governance and how the domain of food system governance transforms as a result. Specifically, we focus on how the boundaries of food systems are redefined and new institutions are developed through the explicit recognition of distal interactions and feedbacks—telecoupling—operating in the food system space. Telecoupling can stimulate new forms of governance, such as the development of codes of conduct and certification schemes, with positive impacts on food and livelihood security; when ignored, telecouplings can exacerbate undesirable social and ecological outcomes in linked systems. We present a typology of telecoupled food systems, highlighting three dimensions of distance that can be present in systems that become telecoupled: social, institutional, and physical. We use that typology to explore the evolution of telecoupling and governance change in two case studies. We associate the tendency for changes in governance that occur in each case with the nature of “distance” in the systems in question: whether the systems are distal in terms of social and/or institutional ties, or in the resource base, or some combination of all three dimensions of distance. The challenge of overcoming distance is not the only issue that affects the possibility of governance change; the cases illustrate that the cultural and economic conditions of the connected systems, the agency of actors involved, and their political and social relations and networks all come to play in enabling governance transformation in telecoupled systems.
Climate change, disasters and electricity generation
Abbrevia ons Foreword 1. Introduc on 8 2. The impacts of changing climate pa erns and changing disaster risks on energy 9 op ons and electricity genera on infrastructure 2.1 The rela onship between climate change and disaster risks 10 2.2 The impact of changing climate pa erns and changing disaster risks on electricity 11 genera on from fossil fuels 2.3 The impact of changing climate pa erns and changing disaster risks on electricity 14 from nuclear power 2.4 The impact of changing climate pa erns and changing disaster risks on electricity 17 genera on from renewable energy 2.4.1 Hydropower 17 2.4.2 Wind Energy 19 2.4.3 Bioenergy 22 2.4.4 Solar Energy 24 3. Climate change and changing disaster risks: implica ons for energy policy and 26 planning