May 11, 2015, Washington, D.C. – Today, IFPRI is launching a new Spanish-language web portal that focuses on food and nutrition security in Central America. The objective of the portal is to provide a set of indicators on food and nutrition security and early warning mechanisms as well as opportunities for dialogue among policymakers, researchers, the private sector and others seeking to increase the resilience of the world’s poor to possible food-related crises, including price and climate shocks.
“Despite the increase in global food supply and the increasing use of agricultural technology in key food-exporting countries, today more than ever before policy makers in food net importing countries (like most countries in Central America) are confronted by increasingly complex challenges to food and nutrition security,” said Maximo Torero, director of the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division at IFPRI.
The portal is designed to pool information and evidence on the different dimensions of food and nutrition security in structured and timely ways to ensure data quality, timeliness, and relevance to the food and nutrition security policies in the region. It also seeks to be a center of dialogue between the different actors involved in food and nutrition security policies to help inform the design of future policies.
One of the feature stories on the portal highlights a geo-spatial tool developed to identify the gaps in public investments needed to reduce poverty, inequality and malnutrition in rural areas of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras using geographic targeting and the prioritization of these investments. This tool demonstrated, for example, that areas of Honduras with low levels of agricultural potential and low efficiency had the highest levels of child migration to the U.S. “This is just one illustration of how rigorous methodology and appropriate data can help governments focus and prioritize public investments given tight budgets,” said Dr. Torero.
The relationship between poverty, inequality, and malnutrition in these areas and child migration from Central American countries will also be explored in a virtual dialogue hosted on the site 26-29 May. The dialogue will feature both a live panel discussion with eight experts in the field of food and nutrition security as well as an open online discussion forum.
“Food and nutrition security is not only a problem of one sector (e.g., agriculture, public health, or economics), it is a multi-sectorial and multi stakeholder problem, and we need multi-sectorial policies with the participation of all stakeholders– private, public and civil society,” said Dr. Torero.
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The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) seeks sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. IFPRI was established in 1975 to identify and analyze alternative national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. www.ifpri.org.