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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

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researcher spotlight

Samuel Benin

Samuel Benin is the Acting Director for Africa in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit. He conducts research on national strategies and public investment for accelerating food systems transformation in Africa and provides analytical support to the African Union’s CAADP Biennial Review.

Where we work

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Where we work

IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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Unit

Foresight and Policy Modeling

Klaten Indonesia. October 26th 2020 . Rice researchers in field. Students of agriculture faculty.

Agrifood systems today are increasingly interconnected, but their future is less certain than ever before. Decision-makers — both public and private — need advance information to understand the growing complexity of these systems, navigate climate uncertainty and frequent crises, and manage trade-offs between competing interests and development goals.

RESEARCH Units

Overview

The Foresight and Policy Modeling (FPM) Unit’s research situates agrifood systems within global and local economies, environments, and development processes. It uses innovative analytical tools to anticipate trends at global, national, and local scales, and develops metrics to track socioeconomic and environmental outcomes at system and household levels.

The Unit’s partnerships with national research institutes around the world ensure that local knowledge, modeling capabilities, and research are collectively shared, and that decision-makers have access to improved data and analytics to help them identify technologies, policies, and investments that can drive inclusive and sustainable food systems transformation.

Areas of Focus

Future food systems

Climate change and environmental constraints make anticipating the future of food, land, and water systems complex. Global foresight analysis, conducted by FPM biophysical and economic modelers and climate change experts, looks at agriculture under different scenarios for climate change, economic growth, and technologies and practices to inform policy and investment decisions.

Inclusive transformation

Forward planning and policy prioritization are essential for national governments, especially because competing goals and limited budgets make trade-offs across goals unavoidable. FPM development economists conduct country economywide modeling of agrifood system transformation and development pathways that can support prioritization of cost-effective policies amid climate change and other risks.  

Local development needs

Policies and technologies for sustainable development must be suitably targeted and tailored to local contexts. To identify local market opportunities and priorities for particular populations and regions, FPM geographers and data scientists use spatial analysis and modeling of agroclimatic conditions and risks, based on remote sensing and high-resolution datasets.

Tools and methods

FPM maintains and employs a suite of models for policy analysis and forecasting, including the IMPACT model of global agriculture and trade; the RIAPA model and surveys used to track national and household poverty, employment, diets, and inequality; and the SPAM database and economic models that track local development.

Explore our research

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Brief

Consumer preferences matter for transforming food systems for sustainable healthy diets: Evidence from rural Bangladesh

2024Ecker, Olivier; Comstock, Andrew R.; de Brauw, Alan; Diao, Xinshen; Talukder, Md. Ruhul Amin
Details

Consumer preferences matter for transforming food systems for sustainable healthy diets: Evidence from rural Bangladesh

Food system transformation strategies rely on consumer demand response for achieving sustainable healthy diets, but food consumption patterns and consumer preferences are often not well understood in many countries of the global South. This brief examines consumer demand in Bangladesh, a country in the take-off stage of agrifood system transformation, that has experienced improvements in diet quality but also an increasing incidence of overweight, with faster increases in rural than urban areas. The authors estimate responses in consumer demand to changes in incomes and changes in food prices, finding that rural consumer demand is driven by strong preferences for animal-source foods, while the demand for sugar and highly processed foods increases faster than total food demand when income rises. They conclude that agricultural value chain development can be an important policy instrument for improving household diet quality but can also lead to undesirable dietary change if food consumption incentives conflict with nutritional needs.

Year published

2024

Authors

Ecker, Olivier; Comstock, Andrew R.; de Brauw, Alan; Diao, Xinshen; Talukder, Md. Ruhul Amin

Citation

Ecker, Olivier; Comstock, Andrew R.; de Brauw, Alan; Diao, Xinshen; and Talukder, Md. Ruhul Amin. 2024. Consumer preferences matter for transforming food systems for sustainable healthy diets: Evidence from rural Bangladesh. IFPRI Issue Brief June 2024. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/144173

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Food Systems; Consumer Behaviour; Rural Areas; Healthy Diets; Demand; Overweight; Modelling; Animal Source Foods; Agricultural Value Chains; Nutrition

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

Foresight

Record type

Brief

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Data Paper

2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Bihar: A Nexus Project SAM

2024International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Bihar: A Nexus Project SAM

The Nexus Project is a collaboration between IFPRI and its partners, including national statistical agencies and research institutions. Our aim is to improve the quality of social accounting matrices (SAMs) used for computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. The Nexus Project develops toolkits and establishes common data standards, procedures, and classification systems for constructing and updating national SAMs. The 2018 Indian State Bihar SAM follows the Standard Nexus Structure. The open access version of the Indian State Bihar SAM separates domestic production into 42 activities. Factors are disaggregated into labor, agricultural land, and capital. Labor is further disaggregated across three education categories. Representative households are disaggregated by rural and urban areas and by per capita consumption expenditure quintile. The remaining accounts include enterprises, government, taxes, savings-and-investment, and the rest of the world.

Year published

2024

Authors

International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

International Food Policy Research Institute. 2024. 2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Bihar: A Nexus Project SAM. Data Paper. Washington, DC: IFPRI. handle: 10568/144198. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/144198

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Southern Asia; Social Accounting Matrix; Computable General Equilibrium; Household Consumption; Household Expenditure; Economic Indicators; Agrifood Systems; Taxes; Labour

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Data Paper

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Data Paper

2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Uttar Pradesh: A Nexus Project SAM

2024International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Uttar Pradesh: A Nexus Project SAM

The Nexus Project is a collaboration between IFPRI and its partners, including national statistical agencies and research institutions. Our aim is to improve the quality of social accounting matrices (SAMs) used for computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. The Nexus Project develops toolkits and establishes common data standards, procedures, and classification systems for constructing and updating national SAMs. The 2018 Indian State Bihar SAM follows the Standard Nexus Structure. The open access version of the Indian State Bihar SAM separates domestic production into 42 activities. Factors are disaggregated into labor, agricultural land, and capital. Labor is further disaggregated across three education categories. Representative households are disaggregated by rural and urban areas and by per capita consumption expenditure quintile. The remaining accounts include enterprises, government, taxes, savings-and-investment, and the rest of the world.

Year published

2024

Authors

International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

International Food Policy Research Institute. 2024. 2018 Social Accounting Matrix for Indian State Uttar Pradesh: A Nexus Project SAM. Data Paper. Washington, DC: IFPRI. handle: 10568/144199. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/144199.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Southern Asia; Social Accounting Matrix; Computable General Equilibrium; Household Consumption; Household Expenditure; Economic Indicators; Taxes; Agrifood Systems; Labour

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Data Paper

Datasets

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Dataset

2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana

2023Ghana Statistical Services; International Food Policy Research Institute; Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research
Details

2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana

The Nexus Project is a collaboration between IFPRI and its partners, including national statistical agencies and research institutions. Our aim is to improve the quality of social accounting matrices (SAMs) used for computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. The Nexus Project develops toolkits and establishes common data standards, procedures, and classification systems for constructing and updating national SAMs. The 2019 Ghana SAM follows the Standard Nexus Structure. The open access version of the Ghana SAM separates domestic production into 42 activities. Factors are disaggregated into labor, agricultural land, and capital. Labor is further disaggregated across three education categories. Representative households are disaggregated by rural and urban areas and by per capita expenditure quintile. The remaining accounts include enterprises, government, taxes, savings-and-investment, and the rest of the word.

Year published

2023

Authors

Ghana Statistical Services; International Food Policy Research Institute; Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research

Citation

Ghana Statistical Services (GSS); Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER); International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 2023. 2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana. Washington, DC: IFPRI [Dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AC7CKV. Harvard Dataverse. Version 1.

Country/Region

Ghana

Keywords

Western Africa; Social Accounting Matrix; Household Consumption; Household Expenditure; Taxes; Economic Indicators; Labor; Sex-disaggregated Data

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/ac7ckv Source record

Project

Foresight

Record type

Dataset

Resource thumbnail

Dataset

2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana

2023Ghana Statistical Services; Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research; International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana

The Nexus Project is a collaboration between IFPRI and its partners, including national statistical agencies and research institutions. Our aim is to improve the quality of social accounting matrices (SAMs) used for computable general equilibrium (CGE) modeling. The Nexus Project develops toolkits and establishes common data standards, procedures, and classification systems for constructing and updating national SAMs. The 2019 Ghana SAM follows the Standard Nexus Structure. The open access version of the Ghana SAM separates domestic production into 42 activities. Factors are disaggregated into labor, agricultural land, and capital. Labor is further disaggregated across three education categories. Representative households are disaggregated by rural and urban areas and by per capita expenditure quintile. The remaining accounts include enterprises, government, taxes, savings-and-investment, and the rest of the word.

Year published

2023

Authors

Ghana Statistical Services; Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research; International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

Ghana Statistical Services (GSS); Institute for Statistical, Social, and Economic Research (ISSER); International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 2023. 2019 Social Accounting Matrix for Ghana. Washington, DC: IFPRI [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AC7CKV. Harvard Dataverse. Version 1.

Country/Region

Ghana

Keywords

Western Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Africa; National Accounting; Household Consumption; Household Expenditure; Taxes; Economic Indicators; Labour

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/ac7ckv Source record

Project

Foresight

Record type

Dataset

Resource thumbnail

Dataset

Food Security Simulator — Nigeria

2023Comstock, Andrew R.; Ecker, Olivier; Pauw, Karl; Thurlow, James
Details

Food Security Simulator — Nigeria

The Food Security Simulator is an innovative and easy-to-use, MS-Excel-based tool for assessing the potential short-term impacts of food price or household income shocks on food security and people’s diets. The Simulator is an ideal tool for first-cut forward-looking evaluations of direct, household-level outcomes of economic crises and policy responses in a timely manner. The tool allows users to enter positive and negative price or income changes in percentage terms and provides simulated changes for a diverse set of food-consumption- and diet-quality-related indicators. In addition to detailed tabular presentations of all simulation results by household income quintile and residential area, key indicator results are summarized in concise overview tables and visualized in graphs for easy export and use in reports. The underlying data include estimates from representative household survey data and rigorous, sophisticated food demand models to capture consumer behavior.

Year published

2023

Authors

Comstock, Andrew R.; Ecker, Olivier; Pauw, Karl; Thurlow, James

Citation

Ecker, Olivier; and Comstock, Andrew R. 2023. Food Security Simulator Nigeria. CGIAR Blog Post. First published online October 26, 2023. https://www.cgiar.org/research/tool/food-security-simulator-nigeria/

Country/Region

Nigeria

Keywords

Africa; Western Africa; Food Security; Data; Diet; Survey Methods; Income

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/wwmn6h Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Dataset

Blogs

Webinar: Lessons from Feed the Future country studies on the drivers of agrifood system transformation
IFPRI Blog
 | 
May 20, 2024

Webinar: Lessons from Feed the Future country studies on the drivers of agrifood system transformation

By Eleanor Jones

Key elements to growth.

Webinar: Launching SPAM2020, the latest innovation in global crop mapping
IFPRI Blog
 | 
May 09, 2024

Webinar: Launching SPAM2020, the latest innovation in global crop mapping

By Zhe Guo, Eleanor Jones, and Liangzhi You

Tools for understanding global trends.

Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project: Finding more effective ways to deliver vital information and innovation to farmers
IFPRI Blog
 | 
December 19, 2023

Developing Local Extension Capacity (DLEC) project: Finding more effective ways to deliver vital information and innovation to farmers

By Kristin Davis and Eleanor Jones

Helping smallholders tap new technologies.

News

November 26, 2023 | In the News

Scientists are racing to protect grass from climate change. Your cheap burger is at stake (Wall Street Journal)

Wall Street Journal (Australia) quotes Keith Wiebe, IFPRI senior research fellow, in an article analyzing how heat waves and drought are threatening pasture on farms worldwide.  “If pasture becomes less productive, prices would be expected to rise, not just for meat, wool and dairy products but also for cereals and other food commodities that would […]

Events

2024 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF)
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

July 8 to 18, 2024

2024 High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF)

The High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) will be held from Monday, July 8, to Wednesday, July 17, 2024, under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council. This includes the three-day ministerial segment of the forum from Monday, July 15, to Wednesday, July 17, 2024 as part of the High-level Segment of the […]

How do we prioritize agrifood system policies and investments? Insights from the RIAPA modeling system
IFPRI Program/Country Event

 | 

June 12, 2024, 10:00 – 11:00 am

How do we prioritize agrifood system policies and investments? Insights from the RIAPA modeling system

Virtual Event: June 12, 2024 at 10:00am-11:00am EDT. In this webinar, we will demonstrate how RIAPA has been used to identify priority agricultural value chains that most effectively contribute to development outcomes.

China Agricultural Sector Development Report 2024 and IFPRI 2024 Global Food Policy Report Launch
Series/Special Event

 | 

June 7, 2024, 9:00 – 11:30 am

China Agricultural Sector Development Report 2024 and IFPRI 2024 Global Food Policy Report Launch

Hybrid Event: June 7, 2024 – 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM +08. The China Agricultural Sector Development Report 2024 (CASDR) and IFPRI 2024 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) hybrid launch event will feature keynote speakers as well as presentations on the overview of the GFPR’s and CASDR’s findings.

Recent Work

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Essential Reading
The Russia-Ukraine Conflict & Global Food Security
The Russia-Ukraine conflict and global food security

The Russia-Ukraine conflict and global food security

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, sparking fears of a global food crisis, IFPRI responded rapidly to the need for information and policy advice to address the crisis. From the first moments of the conflict, a new IFPRI blog series provided critical information and insights into the impacts on food security, caused by rising food, fertilizer, and fuel prices and trade disruptions, for vulnerable countries and regions. This book is a compilation of those blog posts, which include analysis of trade flows, tracking of food prices and policy responses, and results of impact modeling. Together, they provide an overview of how the crisis has progressed, how the international community and individual countries responded with efforts to ensure food security, and what we are learning about the best ways to ensure food security in the aftermath of a major shock to global food systems.

Year published

2023

Project

Markets, Trade, and Institutions (MTI); Food and Nutrition Policy

Engaging women's groups to improve nutrition
Engaging women’s groups to improve nutrition: Findings from an evaluation of the Jeevika multisectoral convergence pilot in Saharsa, Bihar

Engaging women’s groups to improve nutrition: Findings from an evaluation of the Jeevika multisectoral convergence pilot in Saharsa, Bihar

This report presents the endline findings of an impact evaluation of the JEEViKA Multisectoral Convergence pilot, designed as an effectiveness trial, in one district in Bihar, India. JEEViKA, a rural livelihoods project, supports self-help groups (SHGs) – savings and credit-based groups of about 15-20 women, mostly targeted toward those from poor households – with the aim of improving their livelihoods and enhancing household incomes. The JEEViKA Multisectoral Convergence (JEEViKA-MC) pilot went a step further, leveraging these SHGs to address the immediate and underlying determinants of undernutrition among women and children. The multisectoral convergence model, developed by the Bihar Rural Livelihoods Promotion Society with technical support from the World Bank, was piloted in 12 Gram Panchayats of Saharsa district in Bihar. Two complementary sets of interventions-health and nutrition behavior change communication (BCC) to improve women’s knowledge and household practices, and efforts to improve service access through convergence -were layered onto the existing core package of JEEViKA activities and were targeted to women who were members of the SHGs already formed by JEEViKA. Within this target population, households with young children, mothers of young children, and pregnant women were the primary focus of the JEEViKA-MC pilot.

Year published

2019

Project

PHND; A4NH

show me what you eat
Show me what you eat: Assessing diets remotely through pictures

Show me what you eat: Assessing diets remotely through pictures

Goal: Using real-time smartphone meal pictures sent by rural or urban households to better monitor and assess the quality of their diets, and provide tailored recommendations to improve them. Detailed information on household and individual dietary intake is crucial for adequate nutritional monitoring and designing interventions to improve diets. Common recall-based methods are generally time consuming, costly, and subject to non-negligible measurement errors and potential biases. In addition, the scope of information that can be obtained in a regular survey is typically limited. Detailed diaries, in turn, are effort- and time-intensive and prone to errors. With increasing mobile penetration in both urban and rural areas, meal pictures can overcome some of these difficulties, providing real-time, detailed food intake information of individuals remotely and at a minimal cost. Moreover, pictures can be obtained over extended periods of time, beyond the standard short spans (i.e. 24-hours) in recall survey questions, with little to no data quality loss. Such rich consumption data can help identify and better understand vulnerabilities and nutritional imbalances —including specific macronutrient or micronutrient gaps or excesses—, and open the door for low-cost, individually tailored digital interventions to promote healthier diets. Moreover, crowdsourced data allow to identify locally available, affordable foods rich in specific nutrients consumed by similar households in the area. Interventions, in turn, can be delivered through text messages, interactive voice response (IVR), or phone calls, or videos or interactive games integrated into an app, benefitting from a two-way communication channel with individuals.

Year published

2021

Project

MTID

Our experts

Channing Arndt

Channing Arndt

Senior Director, Transformation Strategies, CGIAR and IFPRI, Development
Strategies and Governance, Foresight and Policy Modeling, Natural Resources and Resilience, Innovation Policy and Scaling

James Thurlow

James Thurlow

Director, Foresight and Policy Modeling (FPM), Foresight
and Policy Modeling

Luis Escalante

Luis Escalante

Associate Research Fellow, Foresight
and Policy Modeling, Latin America and the Caribbean

Zhe Guo

Zhe Guo

Senior GIS Coordinator, Foresight
and Policy Modeling

Yumei Zhang

Yumei Zhang

Nonresident Fellow, Foresight
and Policy Modeling

Xuan Chen

Xuan Chen

Research Analyst, Foresight
and Policy Modeling

Peixun Fang

Peixun Fang

Senior Research Analyst, Foresight
and Policy Modeling