Recent years have witnessed an escalation in conflict, especially in developing countries where a significant proportion of the population relies on agriculture. It is crucial to understand how these conflicts impact agricultural production, given its importance for food security and agricultural transformation in these regions. However, research exploring how persistent conflicts affect agriculture is still nascent. Our study adds to this body of research by establishing a causal link between ongoing conflicts and their impact on paddy production, a primary staple crop in Myanmar. This analysis is based on data from a nationally representative phone survey conducted amidst active conflicts. We find that conflict adversely affects paddy production in various ways, including decreases in production and yield, as well as decreases in farmgate prices and the value of production. Our analysis reveals that conflict events, particularly those targeting civilians, have more pronounced negative effects on paddy production, yield, farmgate prices, and the value of production compared to non-targeted conflict incidents that do not purposively target civilians but could potentially disrupt input and output markets. The timing of conflict also significantly affects paddy production, with incidents occurring in mid-season, and during pre-planting and planting periods being the most damaging. Conflict leads to a decrease in the land area devoted to paddy cultivation, lowered probability and intensity of compound fertilizer usage, and an increased reliance on possibly lower quality seeds and exchange labor use. Our findings provide timely and informative insights for development partners and policy frameworks, highlighting the need for emergency assistance and intervention strategies to mitigate the impact of conflict and enhance resilience in areas vulnerable to conflict and instability.

Evidence is scarce on how conflict affects technology adoption and consequent agricultural productivity in fragile states, an important topic given the high share of the extreme poor living in fragile environments globally. Our study contributes to filling this knowledge gap by using unique large-scale data on rice producers in Myanmar before and after a military coup in 2021, leading to a surge of conflicts in the country. We find that the increase in violent events significantly changed rice productivity. Specifically, increases in fatal violent events between 2020 and 2021 reduced rice Total Factor Productivity (TFP) – a measure of how efficiently agricultural inputs are used to produce rice – by about 4 percent on average in the short-run. Moreover, poorer farmers are more affected by conflict, as seen through an increased output elasticity to agricultural equipment owned, indicating reduced output resilience for less-capital owning, and therefore poorer, farmers. This seems partly due to reduced access to agricultural extension services, which would otherwise help farmers maintain productivity, even with limited capital ownership, through substitution with human capital and skills. Lower mechanization service fees partly mitigate these effects. Our results consistently hold for both short- and long-run production functions, across various specifications, and in Upper and Lower Myanmar. These findings suggest that containing and reducing violent events is critical in restoring rice productivity. Improved access to extension services, as well as to cheap mechanization service provision to mitigate lack of equipment ownership, could compensate for these losses and boost the productivity of farmers, especially for those with less production capital, in such fragile settings.

Urbanization and violent conflict have been two global trends gaining more and more momentum in recent years. This has important implications for agricultural development, which unfortunately are still not well understood. Urban proximity is generally associated with agricultural intensification and improved market participation, while farming systems in remote areas are characterized by larger shares of subsistence production. Such differences along the remoteness gradient likely also play a role in how conflict exposure affects agricultural production. That is, we must assume that the effect of conflict on agricultural development is location-dependent—a fact that is generally neglected in empirical analysis. We address this gap by drawing from a unique nationally representative data set of 2,292 paddy farmers in Myanmar and estimating the effect of conflict exposure and travel times on agricultural production during the monsoon season of 2021. By applying multivariate additive models, we allow for nonlinear and interacted effects of conflict exposure and urban proximity, thereby explicitly exploring spatial variation in the effect of conflict exposure. We find strong positive effects of urban proximity on paddy rice intensification and sales, while conflict exposure has disproportionately negative effects in direct proximity to urban centers and very remote areas. For agricultural development—and smallholder incomes in general—this means that productive areas, on the one hand, and the poorest areas of the country, on the other hand, are especially affected by conflict.

Many governments imposed stringent lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health measure to suppress the spread of the disease. With consumer incomes already depressed, the potential impacts of these measures on urban food prices are of particular concern. This working paper examines the changes in Myanmar’s urban food prices during lockdown using detailed food price data collected from a panel of phone surveys conducted in August and September 2020 of 431 family-owned retail shops in Myanmar’s two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. We find that the supply side of Myanmar’s food retail sector was largely resilient to the shocks and lockdowns throughout the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Estimates from a fixed effects differencein-differences model reveal that food prices were 3 percent higher in townships under lockdown compared to those not under lockdown, a statistically significant but modest effect. Lockdowns had smaller effects on prices for highly processed food items sourced directly from companies, but larger effects on prices for raw or lightly processed commodities sourced through wholesale markets, which comprise a larger share of urban consumer’s diets. Retailer margins did not change significantly under lockdown restrictions, suggesting no evidence of price gouging. Overall, our findings of a modest impact of the lockdown on urban food prices underscore the importance of keeping the food supply chain–including wholesale markets and retail shops–functioning as completely and as safely as possible during times of crisis, as was mostly the case early in the crisis for the two cities in this study.

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Agroforestry is recognized as a sustainable land-use management in the tropics, as it provides environmental-friendly ecosystems; it also provides people with their every day need for food and cash. Since the recognition of agroforestry as a science, curricula have been developed for agroforestry programs for undergraduate and graduate trainings in Universities. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop and make available educational material. This textbook strives to provide up-to-date information on tropical agroforestry to serve as educational material in the tropical context. The authoritative textbook of Nair (1993) on agroforestry was published 18 years ago, and before the advent of tree domestication, an important agroforestry practice today. In addition, many other research activities, such as carbon sequestration and integrated pest management, have been included in the agroforestry agenda. This textbook is intended for agroforestry students, teachers, and practitioners.

Ten rounds of the Rural-Urban Food Security Survey (RUFSS) have been conducted between June 2020 and December 2021 to assess the impacts of Myanmar’s economic, political, and health crises on various dimensions of household welfare. RUFSS interviews about 2000 mothers of young children per round from urban Yangon, the rural Dry Zone, and recent migrants from these areas.