"Oxfam’s role is to raise urgent issues up the agendas of policymakers, politicians and publics precisely to help the losers – whether they are losers from conflicts and disasters, drug pricing policies, or in this case food price movements. I’m afraid this usually means a myopic focus on losers in messaging, albeit perhaps to the detriment of our academic credibility. But it does not follow that the result is bad policy-making."
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- Rob Bailey, a senior Oxfam International policy adviser providing a (welcome) response to Dan Rodrik and others who point out that sometimes those in poverty do benefit from low food prices. It’s true, sometimes they do, but like many things, it’s much more complicated than that.
As for Oxfam? Good work on providing a response. It’s all too tempting sometimes to blinker out the criticism, and I always appreciate someone pointing out the difficulties of messaging, soundbites, and our 24hr news cycle attention spans.
