Senior fellow Vijaya Ramachandran and research fellow Ben Leo's blog on the G20 and hedging was featured in The Huffington Post.
From the Article
Last week the G20 agriculture ministers meeting in Paris issued a communiqué calling for the World Food Programme to develop hedging strategies to purchase food. In a little-noticed section toward the end of a 24-page document, the ministers stated: We invite the multilateral, regional and national development banks or agencies to further explore, in connection with the private sector as appropriate:
Development of hedging strategies that could help international humanitarian agencies, in particular WFP, to optimize food procurements and maximize the purchasing power of financial resources, building upon forward purchase.
The statement from the G20 agriculture ministeres may seem like a dry, bureaucratic announcement. We wouldn't blame you for taking this view; people's eyes tend to glaze over whenever the word "procurement" is used. This would be a big mistake, because the communiqué opens the way for changes in WFP procedures that have potentially far-reaching -- indeed, life-saving -- consequences for the world's poorest people. With an annual budget of about $4 billion, the WFP each year provides crucial sustenance to some 100 million people who would otherwise face hunger, malnutrition or even starvation.