IFPRI Insights: August 2020

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August 11, 2020

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COVID-19 & Global Food Security E-Book Released
Edited by Johan Swinnen and John McDermott, this new book compiles key insights and analysis on how the global pandemic is affecting global poverty and food security and nutrition, food trade and supply chains, gender, and employment, as well as reflections on how we can use these lessons to better prepare for future pandemics. (Download E-Book)

COVID Risks to Food Security: David Laborde, Will Martin, Johan Swinnen, and Rob Vos outline the main threats the pandemic poses to global food security and suggest policies and interventions that can help prevent this global health crisis from becoming a global food crisis. (Read Article)

Value for Money?: Buying votes reduces voters’ willingness to hold politicians accountable, leading the politicians to then engage in a higher level of rent-seeking, as lab experiments by Jessica Leight and colleagues show. (Read Article)

Estimating Malnutrition: Francisco Barba, Lieven Huybregts, and Jef Leroy estimate new incidence correction factors, a tool which helps policymakers and implementers predict the burden of child acute malnutrition and corresponding needs for treatment resources. (Read Article)

Respiratory Risks: Avinash Kishore and colleagues warn that seasonal air pollution spikes in India caused, in part, by rice residue burning could coincide with an anticipated COVID resurgence in the fall, potentially threatening public health. (Read Article)

Flood of Data: Hua Xie, Liang You, and colleagues evaluate satellite-based evapotranspiration estimates in Ethiopia, finding that they may help improve hydrological models in agricultural landscapes in data-scarce regions such as Africa south of the Sahara. (Read Article)

>> Read More Research

Catch-up Growth Cannot Undo Undernutrition Damage
Helping stunted children achieve “catch-up growth” has attracted attention as a way to reverse the harms of child undernutrition – but a careful examination of the evidence reveals that the magnitude of the growth impact of nutrition programs is typically only a fraction of what is needed for catch-up growth. More importantly, even if catch-up growth is attained, prolonged undernourishment early in life leads to negative outcomes that are both profound and irreversible. Scientific, program, and policy efforts should focus on preventing maternal and child undernutrition rather than on correcting its consequences. In a blog post based on their recent research, Jef Leroy and colleagues use a cycling analogy to illustrate some of the challenges.(Read Blog)

The Hidden Middle: To improve the livelihoods of smallholders and rural workers, policies will need to develop the “hidden middle” of agrifood supply chains, promoting nonfarm job and income generation, as Rob Vos and Khiem Nguyen argue. (Read Blog)

Financing a New Future: Kate Ambler, Alan de Brauw, and Sylvan Herskowitz provide suggestions on how to improve access to finance for Vietnam’s smallholders, including increasing investment in digital financial technologies as the country battles COVID. (Read Blog)

A Moral Imperative: In South Asia, COVID has triggered the largest disruption of livelihoods in history, affecting more than 1.7 billion people. Rebika Laishram reports back from a recent seminar that discussed how to address the emerging challenges of building inclusive food systems in the region. (Read Blog)

Playing Defense: Yanyan Liu and Liang You explain the defensive measures Kenyan farmers take against pests during the growing season, following their findings that higher temperatures early in the growing season increase farmers’ use of pesticides and decrease their use of productive inputs such as fertilizers. (Read Blog)

>> Read More Blogs

Podcast Episode #7: The Road to Financial Inclusion in Kenya
In the latest episode of Research Talks, IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Liang You tells the story of how IFPRI partnered up with the Government of Kenya as well as private-sector partners in Kenya to develop a financial inclusion product that allows farmers to get loans, highlighting the potential role of the private sector in scaling up solutions for the poor. (Listen to the Episode)

IFPRI Researchers Awarded COVID-19 Big Data Grant
The IFPRI-led “Seeing is believing: using smartphone camera data” project has received rapid-response funding for its work in unlocking agricultural microcredit to farmers in Odisha, India by enabling a microfinance lender to monitor loans using satellite and smartphone imagery. As part of its response to the pandemic, CGIAR’s Platform for Big Data in Agriculture has awarded $100,000 in grants to projects using big data to tackle food system challenges. (Read More)

We are not only not on track to eradicate hunger, food insecurity, and all forms of malnutrition by 2030, but also we need to re-double our efforts given the challenges brought about by COVID-19.” – Qu Dongyu, Director-General, FAO (Event)

Given that small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) account for 80 percent of total employment [in China], the exit of SMEs at such a a large scale means that 13-14% of the Chinese workforce lost jobs during February and May. This must have had a huge adverse effect on poverty and consumption.” – Xiaobo Zhang, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI (Event)

The pandemic, which started as a health crisis, has really shown… a mirror in many ways to some of the age-old problems of the [food] system across the sectors… Agriculture still remains, especially in developing countries, a sector on tenterhooks” – Purvi Mehta, Senior Advisor & Head of Agriculture , Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF-Asia) (Event)

Food systems nowadays contribute to some of the negative effects on the climate and on the environment, so they they have to contribute to the ambitious goals set out in the Commission’s Green Deal.” – Sabine Juelicher, Director, Food and Feed Safety, Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, European Commission (Event)