This book provides fresh insights into concepts, methods and new research findings on the causes of excessive food price volatility. It also discusses the implications for food security and policy responses to mitigate excessive volatility. The approaches applied by the contributors range from on-the-ground surveys, to panel econometrics and innovative high-frequency time series analysis as well as computational economics methods. It offers policy analysts and decision-makers guidance on dealing with extreme volatility.

Food Security, Poverty and Nutrition Policy Analysis: Statistical Methods and Applications, Third Edition combines statistical data analysis and computer literacy, applying the results to develop policy alternatives through a series of statistical methods for real world food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty problems. The book presents the latest uses of statistical methods for policy analysis using the open source statistical environment R, in addition to having the original Stata files and applications. A new chapter on obesity brings in new datasets for analysis to effectively demonstrate the use of such data for addressing policy issues. Finally, program evaluation methods which can be directly applied to the data on food security, nutrition, poverty indicators and causal factors are included. This unique, real-world data takes the reader through a "hands-on" approach toward econometric practice whereby they can also test the effects of policy and program interventions. Further, this is the first book to explore actual data with STATA and R statistical packages that also provides a line-by-line guide to the programming and interpretation of results. Provides a fully revised and updated tome on the latest technology, assessment advances and policy insights surrounding food security Combines case-studies with data-based analysis Includes self-contained, downloadable datasets, statistical appendices, computer programs, and interpretations of the results for policy applications

Climate change, increasing population, food-versus-fuel economics, pandemics, etc. pose a threat to food security to unprecedented levels. It has fallen upon the practitioners of agriculture and technologists of the world to innovate and become more productive to address the multi-pronged food security challenges. Agricultural innovation is key to managing food security concerns. The infusion of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced analytics, satellites data, geospatial data, climatology, sensor technologies, and climate modeling with traditional agricultural practices such as soil engineering, fertilizers use, and agronomy are some of the best ways to achieve this. Data science helps farmers to unravel patterns in fertilizer pricing, equipment usage, transportation and storage costs, yield per hectare, and weather trends to better plan and spend resources. AI enables farmers to learn from fellow farmers to apply best techniques that are transferred learning from AI to improve agricultural productivity and to achieve financial sustainability. Sensor technologies play an important role in getting real-time farm field data and provide feedback loops to improve overall agricultural practices and can yield huge productivity gains. Advanced Analytics modeling is essential software technique that codifies farmers’ tacit knowledge such as better seed per soil, better feed for dairy cattle breed, or production practices to match weather pattern that was acquired over years of their hard work to share with worldwide farmers to improve overall production efficiencies, the best antidote to food security issue. In addition to the paradigm shift, economic sustainability of small farms is a major enabler of food security. The book reviews all these technological advances and proposes macroeconomic pricing models that data mines macroeconomic signals and the influence of global economic trends on small farm sustainability to provide actionable insights to farmers to avert any financial disasters due to recurrent economic crises.

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.

Updates for many countries have made it possible to estimate hunger in the world with greater accuracy this year. In particular, newly accessible data enabled the revision of the entire series of undernourishment estimates for China back to 2000, resulting in a substantial downward shift of the series of the number of undernourished in the world. Nevertheless, the revision confirms the trend reported in past editions: the number of people affected by hunger globally has been slowly on the rise since 2014. The report also shows that the burden of malnutrition in all its forms continues to be a challenge. There has been some progress for child stunting, low birthweight and exclusive breastfeeding, but at a pace that is still too slow. Childhood overweight is not improving and adult obesity is on the rise in all regions. The report complements the usual assessment of food security and nutrition with projections of what the world may look like in 2030, if trends of the last decade continue. Projections show that the world is not on track to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 and, despite some progress, most indicators are also not on track to meet global nutrition targets. The food security and nutritional status of the most vulnerable population groups is likely to deteriorate further due to the health and socio economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report puts a spotlight on diet quality as a critical link between food security and nutrition. Meeting SDG 2 targets will only be possible if people have enough food to eat and if what they are eating is nutritious and affordable. The report also introduces new analysis of the cost and affordability of healthy diets around the world, by region and in different development contexts. It presents valuations of the health and climate-change costs associated with current food consumption patterns, as well as the potential cost savings if food consumption patterns were to shift towards healthy diets that include sustainability considerations. The report then concludes with a discussion of the policies and strategies to transform food systems to ensure affordable healthy diets, as part of the required efforts to end both hunger and all forms of malnutrition.