COMMODITY DEPENDENCE AND DEVELOPMENT: SUGGESTIONS TO TACKLE THE COMMODITIES PROBLEM. ActionAid and South Centre, 2008. A positive correlation has been found between dependence on primary agricultural commodities and poverty, as measured by the human development index. This is due to three prominent features of commodity markets: price volatility; the secular decline of long-term prices; and market concentration. This report argues that the development community should focus more attention on mobilizing the political will to make progress on issues affecting the multilateral trade community. It also attempts to bridge gaps in the current multilateral debates as well as highlight solutions that are controversial or not well known in order to provide more information to all involved. The paper is available online at http://www.southcentre.org/publications/CommodityReport/AA_SC_Commodity_Report.pdf. IMPLICATIONS OF HIGHER GLOBAL FOOD PRICES FOR POVERTY IN LOW-INCOME COUNTRIES, By Maros Ivanic and Will Martin. The World Bank, 2008. In many poor countries, the recent increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor, while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be very diverse, but the average impact on poverty depends upon the balance between these two effects, and can only be determined by looking at real-world data. Results using household data for ten observations on nine low-income countries show that the short-run impacts of higher staple food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and by country, but, that poverty increases are much more frequent, and larger, than poverty reductions. The recent large increases in food prices appear likely to raise overall poverty in low income countries substantially. The paper is available online at http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/IW3P/IB/2008/04/16/000158349_20080416103709/Rendered/PDF/wps4594.pdf. THE CHALLENGE OF REDUCING INTERNATIONAL TRADE AND MIGRATION BARRIERS, By Kym Anderson and Alan L. Winters. The World Bank, 2008. While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly harmful to the world’s poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and freeing up the international movement of workers. A review of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated with these opportunities provides the foundation to undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of opportunities against those aimed at addressing the world’s other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even without factoring in their contribution to alleviating several of the other challenges identified by that project, including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution. The paper is available online at http://go.worldbank.org/DOCGZZMDP0.