Development links

• From the NYT, food surpluses a few years ago, combined with the recent economic crisis, has lead to food research budgets being cut.
• Heard of conflict diamonds? How about conflict metals?
• New research on the agricultural impact of dams appears to confirm the conclusions of a great paper by Ester Duflo and Rohini Pande from a few years ago: those near the dam suffer, but those downstream benefit.
• A new paper from Seema Jayachandran and Ilyana Kuziemko presents evidence that some of the missing girls in India may be due to breastfeeding practices.
• NPR has an interesting story on behavioral economics approaches in the US, similar to programs often used in developing countries. Most interesting is the discussion about the difficulty of modeling irrational behavior in economics.