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Ethiopia’s Agrifood System Book Released
Ethiopia has experienced impressive agricultural growth and poverty reduction in recent years, but today the agriculture sector faces challenges to future growth, including increasing land and water constraints. The book Ethiopia’s Agrifood System: Past Trends, Present Challenges, and Future Scenarios, edited by Paul Dorosh and Bart Minten, illustrates how growth in the country’s agriculture sector remains critical to cutting poverty, and provides lessons relevant for other African countries as well. ( Read Book)
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Deciphering Biodiversity: Channing Arndt and colleagues show how using a biodiversity framework can help quantify the agroecological principles in global food systems and make the trade-off between food security and protection of biodiversity more explicit. (Read Article)
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A Tale of Two States: Francisco Ceballos, Samyuktha Kannan, and Berber Kramer compare the impact of COVID lockdowns on smallholder farmers in two Indian states, finding that one group suffered income losses while the other faced challenges in accessing diverse foods. (Read Article)
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Refugees Who Mean Business: Bangladeshis and Rohingya refugees interact closely through transactions in local goods, services, and labor markets, but refugees have less profitable businesses and lower wages, research by Mateusz Filipski and colleagues shows. (Read Article)
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(Not So) Small Business: Emily Schmidt, Valerie Mueller, and Gracie Rosenbach find that rural non-farm enterprises in Papua New Guinea provide much-needed income for households, who then use the income to consume more protein, kilocalories, and diverse foods. (Read Article)
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Losses at the Farm: Using new food-loss methodologies, Luciana Delgado and colleagues find that food losses are highest at the producer level and most product deterioration occurs before harvest. (Read Article)
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Experimenting with Subsidies for Conservation
Even though conservation agriculture techniques improve soil health and increase yields, yield improvements take on average a decade to occur, posing a challenge for adoption. Mike Murphy, Kate Ambler, and Alan de Brauw conducted a framed field experiment in Ghana to test whether paying farmers subsidies during the initial “years” (or in the experiment, rounds) of adoption would impact adoption rates. The results show that subsidies lead to higher adoption rates of conservation agriculture not only in the rounds in which the subsidy was present, but also even after the subsidy was withdrawn. ( Read Blog)
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COVID and Child Nutrition: Marie Ruel and Derek Headey, writing on behalf of the Standing Together for Nutrition Research group, quantify the potential scale of child mortality and malnutrition impacts under COVID-19, which could include a 14% increase in the prevalence of child wasting. (Read Blog)
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Mentoring for Impact: Since 2012, IFPRI Malawi has been partnering with the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources to offer mentorship to promising young master’s students at its Bunda campus. Sandra Fröbe-Kaltenbach and Cynthia Kazembe highlight some of their stories. (Read Blog)
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Trade and Sustainability: Valeria Piñeiro and other colleagues serving on the T20 task force on Sustainable Energy, Food, and Water Systems propose that the G20 invest in sustainable crop production and information exchange to foster trade agreements, in order to stabilize food markets and achieve social and environmental sustainability. (Read Blog)
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A Partial Agenda: Swati Malhotra and Rob Vos report on the September meeting of the G20 countries’ agriculture and water ministers, where they agreed to strengthen policy cooperation on responsible investments in agrifood systems, but failed to achieve consensus on climate change language. (Read Blog)
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The Trouble with Elasticity Estimation: Alan de Brauw and Sylvan Herskowitz uncover potentially large and arbitrary distortions when using a particular method of estimating expenditure elasticity, as they demonstrate with data on food eaten away from home in Nigeria. (Read Blog)
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Podcast Episode #9: It’s All in the Design: Soil Health Cards in India
In the latest episode of Research Talks, IFPRI Program Manager Vartika Singh tells the story of how IFPRI researchers in India set out to investigate whether government-issued soil health cards were effective in getting smallholders to improve their farming practices. Instead, the researchers discovered an entirely different challenge: farmers couldn’t even understand the cards. ( Listen to the Episode)
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Big Plans for Big Data
One CGIAR and the Platform for Big Data in Agriculture will host a global online event on October 19-23 on “Digital Dynamism for Adaptive Food Systems.” The event will examine food system resilience and highlight how digital tools and technologies can help us sense, respond and (re)build better systems in times of global food security crises. ( Learn More)
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 With so much of Africa’s population dependent on agricultural exports, any trade disruption has serious consequences for the entire continent.” – Jane Nalunga, Executive Director, Southern and Eastern Trade Information and Negotiation Institute (SEANTIN), Uganda (Event)
Given the potential and the scale of the challenges we face in the agricultural sector, has the government really invested enough?” – Nemera Gebeyehu Mamo, Deputy Commissioner, Ethiopia Planning and Development Commission (Event)
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We need research to help us understand the specific questions that we policymakers have about program impact and implementation bottlenecks.” – Anu Garg, Principal Secretary, Women and Child Development, Odisha, India (Event)
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