Economic resilience within the agrifood system is becoming increasingly crucial for assuring sustainable development. This is particularly so in regions with volatile and fragile environments, including Central Asia. Evidence remains scarce regarding what factors can enhance the economic resilience of agents within the agrifood system, including the resilience of productivity and technical efficiency. We partly fill this knowledge gap using the unique panel datasets of farm enterprises in Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, collected in 2019 and 2022, during which these enterprises experienced significant economic shocks in input prices. Using novel methods that combine Inverse Probability Weighting and panel stochastic frontier analyses models, we show that farmers who received more agricultural training and who had been granted greater autonomy in their production decisions in 2018 experienced greater resilience in technical efficiency despite the need to reduce the use of chemical fertilizer and oil/diesel in response to their price surges. Our findings suggest that providing critical public goods like information (related to training) and enabling environment (related to decision-making autonomy) can potentially enhance the resilience in the technical efficiency of farm enterprises. Furthermore, with chemical fertilizer and oil/diesel being potentially environmentally harmful inputs, these farmers also indirectly demonstrated resilience toward environmental sustainability.

"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.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of agrifood systems to shocks and stresses and led to increased global food insecurity and malnutrition. Action is needed to make agrifood systems more resilient, efficient, sustainable and inclusive. The State of Food and Agriculture 2021 presents country-level indicators of the resilience of agrifood systems. The indicators measure the robustness of primary production and food availability, as well as physical and economic access to food. They can thus help assess the capacity of national agrifood systems to absorb shocks and stresses, a key aspect of resilience. The report analyses the vulnerabilities of food supply chains and how rural households cope with risks and shocks. It discusses options to minimize trade-offs that building resilience may have with efficiency and inclusivity. The aim is to offer guidance on policies to enhance food supply chain resilience, support livelihoods in the agrifood system and, in the face of disruption, ensure sustainable access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to all.

New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.

This book illustrates the World Bank’s commitment to assist countries to respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by climate change. Undertaken in collaborative partnership with policy makers, farmers, civil society, and other stakeholders in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, it provides a much needed response to the call for action by quantifying the impact and identifying key priorities for policies, programs, and investments to reduce the vulnerability of agricultural systems to climate change in the South Caucasus. The study responds to the urgent need for climate adaptation, as highlighted in the World Bank’s “Turn Down the Heat” report. Notably, the South Caucasus is already contending with increasing aridity and more frequent extreme weather events (e.g. severe droughts, floods and hailstorms). It presents practical solutions for a more climate smart agriculture, at the regional, national and agro-ecological zone level in each country. The recommendations offered in this book are a compilation of the results of the three national studies, and highlight the need and potential for regional collaborative action to increase benefits, while also continuing to emphasize the need for an effective response at the national level. The national level results are supported by country reports, which provide more details. This work is but an important beginning. To achieve the goals of climate resilience in the agriculture sector, more work is needed to translate the proposals into reality. The analysis demonstrates that investments in irrigation infrastructure and on-farm technologies have great potential to raise agricultural productivity and improve the climate resilience of the sector. Demand-side agricultural water management will have high short-term payoffs, and these short-term payoffs are complementary to the success of long- term irrigation, drainage and other infrastructure investments. Strengthening the disaster risk management strategies (beyond agricultural measures) are also needed to help mitigate household risks from extreme events, especially for the poorest, who are the most vulnerable.

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.

Unless action is taken now to make agriculture more sustainable, productive and resilient, climate change impacts will seriously compromise food production in countries and regions that are already highly food-insecure. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, represents a new beginning in the global effort to stabilize the climate before it is too late. It recognizes the importance of food security in the international response to climate change, as reflected by many countries prominent focus on the agriculture sector in their planned contributions to adaptation and mitigation. To help put those plans into action, this report identifies strategies, financing opportunities, and data and information needs. It also describes transformative policies and institutions that can overcome barriers to implementation. The State of Food and Agriculture is produced annually. Each edition contains an overview of the current global agricultural situation, as well as more in-depth coverage of a topical theme."