Since Amartya Sen’s famous work on Poverty and Famines, economists have understood that policy responses to food market shocks should be guided by changes in households’ incomes and access to food, rather than by overall food availability. Perhaps because the household-level impacts are not directly observable, many policy makers have continued to rely on availability-oriented policies such as export bans. In the Zambia case considered in this paper, export bans imposed in response to an El Niño event exacerbated the poverty problems resulting from the output shock. The combination of household-level data and crop models used in this paper allows us to assess the impacts of weather and price shocks at the household level, and hence to evaluate the suitability of availability-based policies for dealing with weather shocks. These analytical techniques are also useful in identifying the households and regions adversely affected by food output shocks, and hence in designing policies to improve poor consumers’ access to food.

This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the 1970s, when CGIAR was established and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was created to recycle petrodollars. Despite numerous international consultations and an increased number of actors, there has been no real growth in international assistance, except for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The book concurrently focuses on the structural transformation of developing countries in Asia and Africa, with some making great strides in small farmer development and in achieving structural transformation of their economies. Some have also achieved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG2, but most have not. Not only are some countries, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lagging behind, but they face new challenges of climate change, competition from emerging countries, population pressure, urbanization, environmental decay, and dietary transition. Lagging developing countries need huge investments in human capital, and physical and institutional infrastructure, to take advantage of rapid change in technologies, but the role of international assistance in financial transfers has diminished. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only set many poorer countries back but starkly revealed the weaknesses of past strategies. Transformative changes are needed in developing countries with international cooperation to achieve better outcomes. Will change in the United States bring new opportunities for multilateral cooperation?"--

Ending poverty and stabilizing climate change will be two unprecedented global achievements and two major steps toward sustainable development. But the two objectives cannot be considered in isolation: they need to be jointly tackled through an integrated strategy. This report brings together those two objectives and explores how they can more easily be achieved if considered together. It examines the potential impact of climate change and climate policies on poverty reduction. It also provides guidance on how to create a “win-win†? situation so that climate change policies contribute to poverty reduction and poverty-reduction policies contribute to climate change mitigation and resilience building. The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty, but future impacts on poverty are determined by policy choices: rapid, inclusive, and climate-informed development can prevent most short-term impacts whereas immediate pro-poor, emissions-reduction policies can drastically limit long-term ones.

This paper investigates the drivers of export restrictions on agricultural products based on an original dataset developed at IFPRI. We focus on four food price crises when export restrictions (e.g., ban, tax, licensing etc.) were applied: the 2008 and 2010 food price crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 2022 crisis associated with the Russia-Ukraine war. Although the justifications for such trade policies have been discussed in the literature, the ability to forecast their implementation remains understudied. The probit model used in this study suggests that the inflation rate has a higher power to predict export restrictions than do international commodity prices. The probability of export restrictions increases more when price change is measured from a reference level in the long interval than the short interval. Among the covariates, agricultural land per capita, commodity share in production and export, weather condition increases the chances of imposing export restrictions. Per capita income, population density, share of agriculture in GDP, urbanization rate, political economy indicators - all have a negative influence on this likelihood.

The purpose of this review is to assess the extent to which the research outputs of Flagship 3, cluster on The Policy Environment for Value Chains (cluster 3.1) of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) have been used to inform decisions and behaviors of representatives of government organizations, development agencies, researchers, donors, private firms, nongovernment organizations, and other users. The assessment both reviews the achievement of past milestones as well as looks forward to how re-searchers should support the trade agenda in developing countries going forward through their research and communication of research and what should be the focus in the research agenda for developing countries. There are already ongoing and forming activities for which strategic guidance, decisions on allocation of resources across activities, or other research decisions could benefit from this assessment. Areas for prioritization include evaluation of policy changes proposed by policymakers or proactively investigated by the PIM trade team (e.g., reduction in domestic support, lowering tariffs), a trade and nutrition database, work on trade and greenhouse gas emissions, future AATM editions, improving data on trade flows, analysis of impactful events such as COVID-19 and large-scale droughts on world markets and value chains, work on the future of trade multilateralism, research on global value chains and non-tariff measures, and research on advancing value chains for competitiveness and economic development.

On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development. At no other point in history has agriculture been faced with such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. And agriculture continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the damage and loss wrought by disasters. Their growing frequency and intensity, along with the systemic nature of risk, are upending people’s lives, devastating livelihoods, and jeopardizing our entire food system. This report makes a powerful case for investing in resilience and disaster risk reduction – especially data gathering and analysis for evidence informed action – to ensure agriculture’s crucial role in achieving the future we want.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.