IFPRI Insights: July 2020

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July 9, 2020

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New Topics for a New Era
To keep up with current research trends and respond to emerging development challenges, IFPRI has refreshed its topic pages on IFPRI.org, bringing together the Institute’s knowledge and expertise on 27 major research areas. New topics include COVID-19 and Risk & Insurance. (Visit topics page)

Flexibility for Farmers: Francisco Ceballos and Miguel Robles find that providing flexibility in index insurance improves farmer welfare in relation to traditional schemes, but implementing such a system on a commercial basis will require shifting the mindset of private insurance providers. (Read Article)

Agriculture Evolves: Vietnam’s rural economy has increasingly diversified into the non-farm sector and human capital accumulation is the key factor in improving rural household well-being, a study by Yanyan Liu and colleagues shows. (Read Article)

Reliable Recall: Deanna Olney and colleagues validate the 24‐hour dietary recall method in adolescents, finding that half of adolescents omitted foods in recalls, especially sweet or savory snacks, fruits and beverages, but the degree of underestimation is generally acceptable. (Read Article)

A Less Gray Future: Nitrogen fertilizer leaching and runoff in China, the world’s largest consumer of nitrogen fertilizer, contributes to 45-55% of the country’s gray water footprint. But as Liangzhi You and colleagues find, optimal fertilizer and irrigation management could substantially reduce the country’s environmental footprint. (Read Article)

>> Read More Research

Falling Short
Manika Sharma, Avinash Kishore, Devesh Roy, and Kuhu Joshi compared food consumption patterns in India with the EAT-Lancet reference diet, which recommends healthy diets that can feed 10 billion people by 2050 from environmentally sustainable food systems. Their analysis finds that the share of calories from protein sources is only 6–8% in India compared to 29% in the reference diet, with the poorest households experiencing the biggest shortfall. Overall, the average daily calorie consumption in India is below the recommended level across all groups compared except for, again, the richest segment of the population. (Read Paper)

The Value of Good Governance: As low-income countries take decentralized approaches to addressing COVID-19, what should we expect? Katrina Kosec and Tewodaj Mogues argue that in authoritarian contexts, such an approach may bias expenditures toward whatever raises incomes the most, to the detriment of social services. (Read Blog)

Resilience in Food Supply Chains: Jo Swinnen and Tom Reardon review a range of innovations developed by firms to keep international and domestic supply chains running during the pandemic, and make recommendations on how to ensure better food supplies post-crisis. (Read Blog)

Economic Contraction: Xinshen Diao and Michael Wang assess the direct and indirect impacts of COVID lockdowns on Myanmar’s economy, finding that almost all households have reduced income from disrupted domestic economic activity or lost remittances, alongside a 41% decline in GDP. (Read Blog)

Agriculture Gets (Climate) Smart: Alex De Pinto and Nicola Cennachi explain how they and IFPRI colleagues quantified the potential global impact of using climate-smart agriculture in food-crop production for the first time ever, identifying four agronomic practices that can cut Greenhouse Gas emissions and potentially place up to 69 million fewer people at risk of hunger by 2050. (Read Blog)

Food Safety Opportunity: India’s COVID recovery measures offer brighter prospects for improving food safety in India, making it an extremely attractive investment proposition for the private sector, argues Devesh Roy. (Read Blog)

>> Read More Blogs

Podcast Episode #6: The Power of Safety Nets in Egypt
In the latest episode of Research Talks, Egypt’s Minister of Social Solidarity and Social Protection Nivine El-Kabbag and IFPRI researchers Clemens Breisinger and Hoda El Enbaby share the story of their collaboration to evaluate Egypt’s first national conditional cash transfer program. (Listen to the Episode)

A4NH Annual Report
The CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) has released its 2019 Annual Report, highlighting program activities and accomplishments from across its portfolio of five research flagships and cross-cutting work on gender and equity that has impacted five focus and more than two dozen other countries. (Read Report)

PIM Highlights Brochure
The CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) has published its 2019 Highlights, showcasing some of the program’s key
achievements and findings, with a focus on “outcome stories” that show how PIM research has been used around the world. (Read Brochure)

If we are not careful, the COVID-19 crisis will set us back several years in our efforts to eliminate micronutrient malnutrition. But it doesn’t have to.” – Saskia Osendarp, Executive Director, Micronutrient Forum (Event)

[A woman member of SEWA told me before I was coming here], ‘This COVID pandemic has snatched away even the last morsel from our mouths. I do not know how I will feed my family. Just because we are poor, do we not have the right to survive and live?’ This is the large question that we all ought to answer as a response to COVID-19.” – Reema Nanavaty, Director, Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) (Event)

It is important to move away from farming systems toward food systems and to sensitize the global community that inclusiveness… is the essence of development. Whatever we do, we have to make it inclusive. – Ramesh Chand, Member, NITI Aayog (Event)

There is little doubt that we are in the middle of one of the largest social protection scale-up efforts in modern history.” – Ugo Gentilini, Senior Economist, Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, World Bank (Event)

The good news is that the food supply chain in Asia has been remarkably resilient given the challenges that we have faced [including] labor shortages, input shortages, and border challenges…But the impacts of COVID on our industry will last long and beyond the current crisis.” – Steven Bartholomeusz, Policy Director, Food Industry Asia (Event)

I believe together we have pushed the frontier of food policy dialogue to support real action on a number of development challenges.” – Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Director, Communications and Public Affairs Division and Chief of Staff, IFPRI (Event)