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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.

Agnes Quisumbing

Agnes Quisumbing is a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit. She co-leads a research program that examines how closing the gap between men’s and women’s ownership and control of assets may lead to better development outcomes.

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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.

A global food crisis looms amid the war in Ukraine. But there’s a way Canada can help (CBC News) 

March 19, 2022


CBC News (Canada) published an article on how the pandemic and inflation, and now, war and sanctions are threatening food security. Ukrainian land is being shattered by bombs, its seaports disrupted by blockades, and its working-age population increasingly focused on burying enemy soldiers instead of seeds. The ripple effects of this will hit the world’s poor the hardest, with high wheat-importing regions like North Africa especially vulnerable. North Africa (the MENA region) has its own set of worries. The MENA region is a massive wheat consumer for staple dishes and breads. Egypt relies on imports more than anyone, importing nearly triple the volume brought in by Nigeria, the next-largest consumer. Senior research fellow Joseph Glauber said, “If you’d asked me three weeks ago, I’d say, well, ‘Farmers will start to plant crops, and we’ll see those prices start to moderate.’ Assuming good weather. Ukraine was supposed to be a big part of that solution.” Banning grain exports (as Russia has done) or restricting exports (as Algeria has done), Glauber said, “These kinds of actions would drive up prices everywhere on the global market and make it more expensive to feed livestock. And at the end of the day, vulnerable people would suffer most.” He urged politicians to remember the principle of medicine’s Hippocratic oath: ‘Do no harm.’ Because there are a lot of policies that can make matters a whole lot worse. … Don’t do anything that’s going to distort markets further.”  

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