A "supermarket revolution" has occurred in developing countries in the past 2 decades. We focus on three specific issues that reflect the impact of this revolution, particularly in Asia: continuity ...in transformation, innovation in transformation, and unique development strategies. First, the record shows that the rapid growth observed in the early 2000s in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand has continued, and the "newcomers"—India and Vietnam—have grown even faster. Although foreign direct investment has been important, the roles of domestic conglomerates and even state investment have been significant and unique. Second, Asia's supermarket revolution has exhibited unique pathways of retail diffusion and procurement system change. There has been "precocious" penetration of rural towns by rural supermarkets and rural business hubs, emergence of penetration of fresh produce retail that took much longer to initiate in other regions, and emergence of Asian retail developing-country multinational chains. In procurement, a symbiosis between modern retail and the emerging and consolidating modern food processing and logistics sectors has arisen. Third, several approaches are being tried to link small farmers to supermarkets. Some are unique to Asia, for example assembling into a "hub" or "platform" or "park" the various companies and services that link farmers to modern markets. Other approaches relatively new to Asia are found elsewhere, especially in Latin America, including "bringing modern markets to farmers" by establishing collection centers and multipronged collection cum service provision arrangements, and forming market cooperatives and farmer companies to help small farmers access supermarkets.
World food crises are relatively
rare events, occurring roughly three times a century. But they also tend to be
regular events, every three decades or so, suggesting there is an underlying cyclical ...cause. If so, far-sighted donor and government investments in raising agricultural productivity, and policies on behalf of stable food production and prices, might go a long way to preventing food crises in the future. Preventing food crises rather than trying to cope after the fact with their impact on the poor is the only way to avoid substantial, perhaps permanent, damage to the welfare of poor households. Lessons from the world food crises in 1972/73 and in 2007/08, especially lessons from how the world rice market functioned, point the way toward improved food policy management at national and international levels in the future.
Food prices are a key signal about what is happening to food security, and two dimensions are important: their average level (and whether this is rising or falling in the long run) and their ...volatility. Food price instability slows down economic growth and the structural transformation that is the pathway out of rural poverty. The best approaches to improving food security depend on which global food price regime is likely to drive policy formation between now and 2050. The historical path of structural transformation with falling food prices, leading to a 'world without agriculture', is an obvious possibility. But continued financial instability, coupled with the impact of climate change, could lead to a new and uncertain path of rising real costs for food, with a reversal of structural transformation. Management of food policy, and the outlook for sustained poverty reduction, will be radically different depending on which of these global price regimes plays out.
Reardon et al describe the transformation of agricultural food systems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America by describing the traditional retail and wholesale system, including its procurement system. ...They also examine the determinants of and patterns in the diffusion of supermarkets in the three geographical regions and discuss the evolution of procurement systems of these supermarkets as well as its consequences for agricultural food systems. They found out that the procurement practices of supermarkets and large processors are quickly reformulating the rules of the game for farmers and first-stage processors.
The development of posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS) can occur following a traumatic injury, which may include an increase in negative cognitions. One cognitive construct shown to be associated ...with the development of PTSS is event centrality, or the degree to which an individual views a traumatic experience as central to their life story. Although cross‐sectional work has demonstrated a robust connection between event centrality and PTSS, the directionality of this association remains unclear. Most previous work has investigated centrality as a predictor of PTSS, although one recent study suggests that PTSS may, in fact, predict event centrality. The current longitudinal study enrolled adult civilian participants (N = 191) from a Level 1 trauma center following a traumatic injury and assessed both event centrality and PTSS at three points posttrauma (3, 12, and 18 months). A time‐constrained random intercept cross‐lagged panel analysis showed that PTSS predicted event centrality over the 18‐month follow‐up period, B = 0.16, p = .021, but event centrality did not predict PTSS, B = ‐0.27, p = .340. These findings suggest that the development of PTSS following trauma exposure may lead to the perception of the traumatic event as central to an individual's story over time. Further longitudinal research is necessary to determine what variables may influence the connection between PTSS and event centrality.
Individuals who have experienced more trauma throughout their life have a heightened risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following injury. Although trauma history cannot be ...retroactively modified, identifying the mechanism(s) by which preinjury life events influence future PTSD symptoms may help clinicians mitigate the detrimental effects of past adversity. The current study proposed attributional negativity bias, the tendency to perceive stimuli/events as negative, as a potential intermediary in PTSD development. We hypothesized an association between trauma history and PTSD symptom severity following a new index trauma via heightened negativity bias and acute stress disorder (ASD) symptoms. Recent trauma survivors (N =189, 55.5% women, 58.7% African American/Black) completed assessments of ASD, negativity bias, and lifetime trauma 2‐weeks postinjury; PTSD symptoms were assessed 6 months later. A parallel mediation model was tested with bootstrapping (10,000 resamples). Both negativity bias, Path b1: β = −.24, t(187) = −2.88, p = .004, and ASD symptoms, Path b2: β = .30, t(187) = 3.71, p < .001, fully mediated the association between trauma history and 6‐month PTSD symptoms, full model: F(6, 182) = 10.95, p < .001, R 2= .27; Path c’: β = .04, t(187) = 0.54, p = .587. These results suggest that negativity bias may reflect an individual cognitive difference that can be further activated by acute trauma. Moreover, negativity bias may be an important, modifiable treatment target, and interventions addressing both acute symptoms and negativity bias in the early posttrauma period may weaken the link between trauma history and new‐onset PTSD.
A revolution in food systems—food supply chains upstream from farms, to the food industry in the midstream segments of processing and wholesale and in the downstream segment of retail, then on to ...consumers—has been under way in the United States for more than a century and in developing countries for more than three decades. The transformation includes extensive consolidation, very rapid institutional and organizational change, and progressive modernization of the procurement system. In this article we examine the economics of these system-wide changes. We argue that the steps of conceptualizing and empirically researching this transformation—its patterns and trends, determinants, and impacts on farms and processing small and micro enterprises—are still in their infancy because of (a) remaining limitations on data suitable for formal modeling and hypothesis testing and (b) the sheer complexity of food systemrelated decisions that need to be modeled and understood. With the rapid accumulation of high-quality data now under way, conceptual and theoretical progress is also likely to be rapid.
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