IFPRI Insights: May 2018

*|MC:SUBJECT|*

View this email in your browser

May 3, 2018

Forward

Towards a Shared Vision

Launched in 2003, IFPRI’s partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has brought us many steps closer to our shared vision of a world free of poverty and hunger. Explore our 15-year partnership across four high impact theme: gender, agriculture, nutrition and impact. (Visit Website)

Mother’s Instinct: Amanda Zongrone, Purnima Menon, and Khaled Adiba investigate if maternal self-efficacy in Bangladesh enhances the chances of feeding green leafy vegetables and introducing eggs, diets complementary to breastfeeding, to children between 6 months and 2 years of age. (Article)

Investing Right: James Thurlow’s economy-wide systems approach, applied retrospectively, reveals Mozambique’s investment plan from 2012 to 2017 would not achieve national growth targets set for the future, despite doubling public spending on agriculture. (Article)

Pestering the Pests: Wei Zhang, Edward Kato and Prapti Bhandary find Nigerian farmers’ perceptions of crop pest severity are associated with landscape, agronomic and socio-economic factors. (Article)

Banned Exports: Malawi’s long-term maize export ban, lifted in October 2017 after nearly six years, benefited the urban non-poor, while poor farmers’ incomes and maize consumption levels declined in the long run, Karl Pauw’s research shows. (Article)

Progressing, Humanly: Channing Arndt’s examinations of poverty in 26 African countries suggest all these African nations are advancing, but a human rights-based approach paints a more complex picture. (Article)

>> Read More Research

Slow and Unsteady

David Laborde Debucquet and Will Martin’s latest modeling projects the global economic slowdown will result in 34 million more people worldwide remaining in poverty by 2030, compared to more optimistic earlier projections. More than half the increase comprised of farmers. (Read More)

New WEAI Website
Find the latest information, suite of research tools, datasets, and more on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI). (Website)

Not So Pumped: In the Indian state of Bihar, Avinash Kishore finds that the solar-powered irrigation pumps have been an effective means for boosting wheat yields that is cheaper than diesel pumps, but implementing the technology in a sustainable way comes with challenges. (Blog)

Cropping All In: A Global Crop Improvement Network, according to Mark Rosegrant, could help boost yields and improve understanding of climate effects on agriculture by bringing together crop research institutions across the globe. (Blog)

Think Local: International investments in agriculture have many benefits for food systems—but should be carefully implemented with local input, write Shelleka Darby, James Zhan, William Speller and Hafiz Mirza. (Blog)

Staple Promise: With migration on the rise, Katrin Glatzel argues, the demand for staple crops in Africa offers economic opportunity for rural areas. (Blog)

>> Read More Blogs

“The rapid agricultural growth of Indonesia in the 70s and 80s that really was a miracle…made a clear case that it’s productivity enhancing investments that are important, not the distorting of food and fertilizer prices”- Mark Rosegrant, Research Fellow Emeritus, International Food Policy Research Institute (Video)

“Never in the history have global political economic and financial systems been more interconnected. Global food system is no exception“- James Zhan, Senior Director, Investment and Enterprise, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) (Video)

“With the 2018 Global Report on Food Crises, we have jointly built a powerful tool: a thermometer to define the temperature, the location and root causes of each crisis.”– Neven Mimica, Commissioner, International Cooperation and Development, European Commission (Video)

“Our ideas about migration are barely evidence-based. We need to share more thoughts and data about migration. We need to focus both on the migrants and the local hosting communities that carry the burden.”– Marit Maij, Special Envoy for Migration, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Netherlands (Video)