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Why are sustainable healthy diets critical, and how can we transform food systems to achieve them?
Healthy diets provide the nutrients needed for an active, healthy life. They include a diversity of foods—fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, whole grains, and animal-source foods. They limit sugar, salt, and fat while providing essential nutrients and health-protective elements. But for many people around the world, healthy diets are often not desirable, affordable, accessible, or available for a variety of reasons.
The 2024 Global Food Policy Report Food Systems for Healthy Diets and Nutrition, launched on May 29, is an important contribution to the global dialogue on diets, nutrition and public health, and sustainable development, providing recommendations for the transformative change required for global food systems to ensure sustainable healthy diets and nutrition for all.
Explore the 2024 GFPR resources:
GFPR Website | Report and Synopsis | Press Release | Blog | Launch Event
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Famines and Fragility: Making humanitarian, developmental, and peacebuilding responses work
CGIAR Seminar Series | June 11, 2024, 9:30AM to 11:15AM EDT
How Do We Prioritize Agrifood System Policies and Investments? Insights from the RIAPA modeling system
Webinar | June 12, 2024, 10:00AM to 11:00AM EDT
The Unjust Climate: Measuring the impacts of climate change on rural poor, women, and youth
Virtual Policy Seminar | June 18, 2024, 9:30AM to 11:00AM EDT
CGIAR Science Week
Event | July 1-5, 2024
Please check our Events page for most recent updates.
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Famine in Gaza, questions for research and preventive action
The latest assessment of the Integrated Phase Classification (IPC) Global Partnership estimates that 685,000 people in Gaza—more than half of the population—were facing “catastrophic” levels of acute food insecurity or famine-like conditions by early March 2024. As the war has escalated further and the entry of humanitarian assistance (including food, water, and medicine) has been heavily restricted, many are now on the brink of famine or already suffering from starvation.
In this article in Nature Food, Rob Vos, Ismahane Elouafi, and Johan Swinnen examine how research can help us understand and anticipate the long-term impacts of the conflict on people and livelihoods, design more effective humanitarian support systems, and identify options for creating resilient post-conflict livelihoods. ( Read article)
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We need to know the economic impacts of Sudan’s ongoing conflict: Sudan’s conflict is having major impacts on its fragile economy. Accurate measures of these impacts are needed to support conflict resolution and international aid efforts, but this proves extremely challenging in a data-scarce country like Sudan. Khalid Siddig and Mohammed Basheer outline key actions that are needed to enhance economic estimates of the impact of the conflict. ( Read article in Nature Human Behavior
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Gender bias in customer perceptions: The case of agro-input dealers in Uganda: A new study co-authored by Bjorn Van Campenhout tests if farmers perceive male-managed agro-input shops differently than those managed by women. The authors find that gender bias favoring men persists, contributing to male dominance in the sector and creating unfair competition and entry barriers for women. ( Read article in Agricultural Systems
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Food prices and the wages of the poor: The affordability of nutritious food for “all people, at all times” is a critically important dimension of food security. Yet, timely high-frequency indicators of food affordability are rarely collected in any systematic fashion — especially during rapidly evolving crises. Derek Headey, Fantu Bachewe, Quinn Marshall, Kalyani Raghunathan, and Kristi Mahrt advocate tracking the wages of the poor as a timely, accurate, and cost-effective means of monitoring food affordability for the world’s poor. ( Read article in Food Policy
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Emission savings through the COP26 declaration on deforestation could come at the expense of non-forest land conversion: The majority of signatories to the UN Climate Change Conference in 2021 (COP26) pledged to end deforestation by 2030. Using an open-source land-use model, Abhijeet Mishra et al. project that this could help avoid 167 million ha of deforestation by 2050 compared to a baseline without extended forest protection. However, this would lead to increased conversion of non-forested land to agriculture. ( Read article in Environmental Research Letters
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| In April 2023, Sudan descended into a violent civil war that has displaced more than 8 million people, destroyed critical infrastructure, and left half the country’s population in need of humanitarian assistance. This policy seminar on May 2 reflected on urgent data, analytical, and policy needs to mitigate food insecurity and revitalize food systems in Sudan. ( Watch recording) |
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| The bioeconomy approach to sustainable development holds great promise in reducing dependence on fossil fuels, addressing climate change, and promoting resource-use efficiency. This event on May 7 was held to explore the role of the bioeconomy in addressing food security, nutrition and diets, and poverty reduction. ( Watch recording) |
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| The IMPACT global modeling system links climate, crop, water, and economic models to explore alternative futures for food and agriculture. This webinar on May 15 focused on using IMPACT to analyze how climate impacts on agrifood systems may vary both across locations and over time in the coming decades, and how that can inform decisions about policies and investment today. ( Watch recording) |
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| Geopolitical tensions, conflicts, climate change and sustainability challenges, and the troubling rise in the number of malnourished people worldwide form part of the complex web of factors shaping agrifood dynamics. This event on May 30 set forth potential approaches to aligning trade policies with the imperatives of sustainability, climate change adaptation and mitigation, food security, and poverty reduction. ( Watch recording) |
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| Food systems provide important benefits to the global population, but also entail hidden environmental, health, and social costs. This policy seminar on June 6 discussed the hidden costs of food systems and the remedies to reduce this economic burden, while moving toward more sustainable, health-promoting, and socially inclusive food systems. ( Watch recording) |
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Research-backed policy to eliminate miniket rice in Bangladesh will improve nutrition: Miniket rice is made by taking varieties of rice with medium-slender shapes and transforming them into more slender grains using a high degree of milling. Processing renders miniket significantly less nutritious than other common rice types in Bangladesh, IFPRI research shows, and this issue led the government to ban the sale of miniket rice in 2023. Victor Taleon and Zakiul Hasan delve into the food system and nutrition implications. ( Read blog)
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To improve Africa’s soil health and plant nutrition, empower women farmers: Gender inequality is deeply embedded in soil health and plant nutrient management. Claudia Ringler and Cargele Masso highlight the launch of the African Union’s African Fertilizer and Soil Health Action Plan: 2023–2033 at a Nairobi summit May 7–9 and a May 8 side event that focused on empowering women farmers. ( Read blog)
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Soaring cocoa prices: Diverse impacts and implications for key West African producers: Cocoa bean prices have been rising since the last quarter of 2023, hitting a record high of $10.97 per kilogram on April 19. The current price spike was triggered by intertwined effects of climate change and El Niño. Martin Paul Jr. Tabe-Ojong, Onasis Tharcisse Adetumi Guedegbe, and Joseph Glauber explore the implications of this price spike. ( Read blog)
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Launching SPAM2020, the latest innovation in global crop mapping: IFPRI’s Spatial Allocation Model (SPAM) has provided a key tool for assessing croplands since its introduction in 2000. To develop SPAM2020, IFPRI partnered with the Land & Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute to update the model and global map. These now include data from 2020 and encompass 46 crops and crop groups, covering over 90% of global crop area. Zhe Guo, Eleanor Jones, and Liangzhi You discuss the launch of SPAM2020 at an April 29 webinar. ( Read blog)
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Integrating measures of women’s empowerment into rural development projects: Development projects are increasingly using quantitative impact assessments to evaluate whether they are achieving their intended objectives. Carlo Azzarri, Sedi-Anne Boukaka, Jessica Heckert, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, Greg Seymour, and Sara Savastano explain a new tool, the Integrated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (iWEAI), that provides a streamlined way to track and evaluate impacts on women’s empowerment in development projects. ( Read blog)
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Lessons from Feed the Future country studies on the drivers of agrifood system transformation: Agrifood system transformation is an essential indicator of progress within the landscape of global development. IFPRI and its research partners have studied the pace and pattern of agricultural transformation within the USAID Feed the Future (FTF) countries. Eleanor Jones writes about a recent USAID Agrilinks Webinar with James Thurlow, Valeria Piñeiro, and Kwaw Andam that highlighted important lessons from 21 FTF country case studies. ( Read blog)
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Responding to Malawi’s impending food crisis: Malawi is heading towards a severe food crisis later this year after an El Niño induced mid-season dry spell—the worst in the last hundred years—affected the harvest of maize, the staple food grown by 9 out of 10 farming households. Jan Duchoslav, Mazvita Chiduwa, Simon Denhere, Joachim De Weerdt, Rodwell Mzonde, and George Phiri argue that, faced with limited funds and a limited time window, importing food is the only no-regrets option available. ( Read blog)
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For more than three decades, IFPRI has worked with the Government of Ethiopia to provide evidence-based advice on the development of the country’s agricultural sector.
IFPRI’s research and policy recommendations led to the establishment of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) in 2010, which continues to play a critical role in guiding the country’s agricultural development and sustainability.
Tamsin Zandstra, Gashaw T. Abate, Shahidur Rashid, and Nicholas Minot outline how IFPRI’s long-term strategic research support to the ATA has led to several tangible government policy outcomes.
To learn more, read a new interactive story in our ” Making a Difference” series.
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Malawi faces a food crisis: Why plans to avert hunger aren’t realistic and what can be done: The Conversation published an article by Joachim De Weerdt and Jan Duchoslav about the potential for a severe food crisis in Malawi later this year due to drought brought on by the El Niño weather pattern, which has severely affected the maize harvest. ( Also covered in The Times Group
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Transforming food systems for sustainable healthy diets: a global imperative: The Agriculture & Food blog of World Bank Blogs published an op-ed by Purnima Menon and Deanna Olney on the 2024 Global Food Policy Report, which emphasizes the need for sustainable healthy diets and provides evidence-based recommendations on ways to make the foods that form these diets more desirable, affordable, accessible, and available.
38% of Indians consume fried snacks and processed foods, only 28% consume healthy food: Down to Earth explores data on diets and nutrition in India from IFPRI’s 2024 Global Food Policy Report, citing that 16.6 percent of the country’s population suffers from malnutrition.
Measuring the pulse of pulses: Improving food security in Sri Lanka: Daily News published an op-ed co-authored by Suresh Babu providing recommendations for sustainable pulse production to meet the dietary consumption and nutritional requirements of Sri Lanka’s growing population.
Opportunities emerging from climate change and oversupply discussed at AgriBusiness Global LATAM Conference: AgriBusiness Global writes that Valeria Piñeiro, keynote speaker at the conference, discussed climate change and the opportunities and challenges it brings to Central America and the Caribbean’s crop protection industry.
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