Myanmar has endured multiple crises in recent years — including COVID-19, global price instability, the 2021 coup, and widespread conflict — that have disrupted and even reversed a decade of economic development. Household welfare has declined severely, with more than 3 million people displaced and many more affected by high food price inflation and worsening diets. Yet Myanmar’s agrifood production and exports have proved surprisingly resilient. Myanmar’s Agrifood System: Historical Development, Recent Shocks, Future Opportunities provides critical analyses and insights into the agrifood system’s evolution, current state, and future potential. This work fills an important knowledge gap for one of Southeast Asia’s major agricultural economies — one largely closed to empirical research for many years. It is the culmination of a decade of rigorous empirical research on Myanmar’s agrifood system, including through the recent crises. Written by IFPRI researchers and colleagues from Michigan State University, the book’s insights can serve as a to guide immediate humanitarian assistance and inform future growth strategies, once a sustainable resolution to the current crisis is found that ensures lasting peace and good governance.

The recent history of rural economic transformation in Myanmar and the effects of COVID-19 and the military coup in February 2021 provide important lessons for the design and implementation of plans to help the country recover from these scourges. The impoverishment of farming communities in Myanmar during decades of socialist military rule, beginning in the 1960s until the turn of the century, led to an outflux of migrants to neighboring countries. As the country opened up to foreign investment through economic reforms initiated in 2011, rural wages surged and farm mechanization services expanded rapidly. Together with increased remittance flows from migrants, higher rural household incomes drove growth in a wide range of non-farm service enterprises. Nevertheless, agricultural growth was low and most crop subsectors stagnated due to underlying and unresolved structural constraints such as poor infrastructure and inequality in land access. As in many other countries in Asia, border closures and lockdowns instituted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 resulted in widespread employment and income losses. The Myanmar government pro-actively sought to mitigate the impacts through expanded credit to farmers and businesses. By the end of 2020, Myanmar was beginning to recover from the economic stresses of COVID-19. However, the February 2021 military coup resulted in a far more severe economic downturn than COVID-19 due to the collapse of the financial system, the massive resignations by public sector employees, and the prolonged movement restrictions. Coup-induced state failure greatly magnified the health and economic consequences of COVID-19 in terms of poverty, food insecurity, and stalled economic transformation. This paper uses a combination of macro, meso, and micro-level analyses to measure the impacts of COVID-19 and state failure on rural economic transformation through the lens of the agri-food system, and to draw lessons for policies to support broad-based and resilient economic recovery.

The Agricultural Outlook 2021-2030 is a collaborative effort of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. It brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations as well as input from collaborating member countries to provide an annual assessment of the prospects for the coming decade of national, regional and global agricultural commodity markets. The publication consists of 11 Chapters; Chapter 1 covers agricultural and food markets; Chapter 2 provides regional outlooks and the remaining chapters are dedicated to individual commodities.

Agri-food exports are important for Myanmar’s economic takeoff, in particular for the transformation of agri-food systems. This paper analyzes the past performance of key agri-food exports and assess their role and future potential to contribute to the transformation of Myanmar’s agri-food system and the overall economy.

Myanmar’s agrifood system has proven surprisingly resilient in the face of multiple crises—COVID 19, the military coup, economic mismanagement, global price instability, and widespread conflict—with respect to production and exports. Household welfare has not been resilient, however. High rates of inflation, especially food price inflation, have resulted in dietary degradation across all house hold groups, especially those dependent on casual wage labor. Among household members, young children experience the highest rates of inadequate dietary quality. Expanded social protection to improve access to better-quality diets for vulnerable households and individuals is therefore needed. Beyond the current political crisis, increased public and private investment in a more efficient and dynamic agrifood system should be a high priority. This will help drive down poverty rates and ensure access to healthy diets in the near term, while laying the foundation for sustained growth and structural transformation of the economy.

This open access book examines the interactions between India’s economic development, agricultural production, and nutrition through the lens of a “Food Systems Approach (FSA).” The Indian growth story is a paradoxical one. Despite economic progress over the past two decades, regional inequality, food insecurity and malnutrition problems persist. Simultaneously, recent trends in obesity along with micro-nutrient deficiency portend to a future public health crisis. This book explores various challenges and opportunities to achieve a nutrition-secure future through diversified production systems, improved health and hygiene environment and greater individual capability to access a balanced diet contributing to an increase in overall productivity. The authors bring together the latest data and scientific evidence from the country to map out the current state of food systems and nutrition outcomes. They place India within the context of other developing country experiences and highlight India’s status as an outlier in terms of the persistence of high levels of stunting while following global trends in obesity. This book discusses the policy and institutional interventions needed for promoting a nutrition-sensitive food system and the multi-sectoral strategies needed for simultaneously addressing the triple burden of malnutrition in India.

Agricultural input retailers play a key role in Myanmar’s agri-food system by supplying farmers with fertilizer, seed, pesticides, and other inputs necessary for successful harvests. Because farm-level input use is an important driver of yields for all major food crops, shocks to the input retail sector have major implications both for rural household welfare and for national food security. COVID-19 and the policies enacted to mitigate its spread have shocked Myanmar’s economy. Agricultural input retailers, like many other businesses, are squeezed between both supply and demand side shocks. On the supply side, agricultural inputs have long, international supply chains that could be disrupted by restrictions on international or internal trade and transport. On the demand side, the shocks to rural households’ incomes, crop prices, and uncertainty could affect input purchases. This research note seeks to help the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Irrigation of the Government of Myanmar and agricultural sector stakeholders understand the related shocks to Myanmar’s agricultural input retailers. We conducted a phone survey with 221 input shop owners and managers to understand (i) the demand-side effects of COVID-19 shocks as reflected in sales of key inputs, such as fertilizers, maize seed, vegetable seeds, and pesticides,the supply-side effects both in general and for key inputs, and (iii) business responses to COVID-19 shocks.