IFPRI Insights: May 2020

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May 7, 2020

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A New Home for IFPRI COVID-19 Analysis
A new webpage showcasing the breadth of analysis from IFPRI researchers on how COVID-19 is shaping food and nutrition security and development is now live. The webpage features blog posts, events, contributions from IFPRI’s country and regional offices, content in several languages, and more. (Visit Webpage)

Opportunity to Address Gender Equality: Past research and learning indicates that even small changes to the design and implementation of social protection programs can generate gains in gender equality. Melissa Hidrobo, Neha Kumar, Tia Palermo, Amber Peterman, and Shalini Roy summarize the ways in which low- and middle-income countries’ social protection programs could address gender during the COVID-19 crisis. (Read Issue Brief)

Tinkering with Technologies: Bart Minten, Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse, and colleagues find that a a new technology, row planting, did not significantly affect teff yields at the farm level in Ethiopia. The authors look at whether literacy levels and information access of adopting households play a mediating role. (Read Article)

Bottlenecks to Good Nutrition: Despite having relatively good agricultural infrastructure and educational systems, the population of Tajikistan suffers from high rates of undernutrition. Hiroyuki Takeshima, Kamiljon Akramov, Jarilkasin Ilyasov, Yanyan Liu, and Tanzila Ergasheva investigate agriculture-nutrition links in the country. (Read Article)

Futuristic Food Demand: A new study by Will Martin and Emiko Fukase suggests that, assuming continued income convergence between poor and rich countries, per capita food demand growth is likely to be a more important driver of food demand than population growth between now and 2050, and may cause world food prices to spike. (Read Article)

Road to Resilience: There is no evidence that Ethiopia’s 2015 drought, one of the worst in decades, led to widespread increases in child undernutrition, according to research by Kalle Hirvonen and colleagues. The authors find that chronic undernutrition rates did increase, however, in drought-exposed areas with poor roads. (Read Article)

Measurement Mission: Jowel Choufani, Sunny Kim, Phuong Hong Nguyen, and Purnima Menon develop a framework to guide the design of survey questions that can consistently measure infant and young child feeding counselling coverage, data on which could allow for cross-country comparisons and scale up nutrition services. (Read Article)

>> Read More Research

Regressive Restrictions
In the face of COVID-19, some national governments have begun restricting food exports. This behavior can have dire unintended consequences for vulnerable people in food-importing countries by increasing prices and exacerbating food insecurity. David Laborde, Abdullah Mamun, and Marie Parent have been monitoring these activities using the COVID-19 Food Trade Policy Tracker, which shows the percentage of each country’s imported calories that are impacted by export restrictions. Currently, 19 countries have implemented or announced export restrictions, which affect 5 percent of globally-traded calories. (View Tracker)

Monitoring Market Stress
The Food Security Portal’s COVID-19 Food Price Monitor for South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara, a project led by Manuel Hernandez, Soonho Kim, Brendan Rice and Rob Vos, tracks changes in food prices since the start of social distancing measures. The Monitor is already raising a number of red flags. Prices of various commodities in Uganda have spiked compared to pre-COVID levels, while other countries such as Burundi have seen moderate increases. Still other countries, such as Rwanda, have seen minimal movement. (View M onitor)

Spotlight on COVID-19: IFPRI is curating a special series of blogposts analyzing the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national and global food and nutrition security, poverty, and development. The series is edited by IFPRI director general Johan Swinnen and A4NH director John McDermott. (Read Blogs)

No Respite from Hunger: Sara Gustafson provides details on the newly-released 2020 Global Report on Food Crises, which estimated that 135 million people in 55 countries around the world faced acute levels of hunger in 2019, the highest level seen since the report’s inception in 2017. (Read Blog)

Earth Day Lessons: With the 50th anniversary of Earth Day falling in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic, Wei Zhang, Elizabeth Bryan, Claudia Ringler, and Ruth Meinzen-Dick make the case that to truly win the fight against COVID and achieve a more sustainable future, the world needs to broaden its efforts to link human health with environmental protection and consider all aspects of the environment. (Read Blog)

Empowerment and Equity: As the world contends with COVID-19 and other challenges, Laura Zseleczky, Hazel Malapit, Ruth Meinzen-Dick, and Agnes Quisumbing lay out how food systems can be transformed to enable women to participate and benefit equally and empower them to make strategic life choices. (Read Blog)

Through the Country Lens: John McDermott showcases the many ways in which country-level food system transformation can provide opportunities for greater inclusion of poor and marginalized people, and help decisionmakers more clearly identify system drivers, data gaps, and entry points for policy and program action. (Read Blog)

Crisis of “Biblical” Proportions: Lawrence Haddad explains how the COVID-19 crisis could impact the food and nutrition security of not only this generation, but also future ones, making the case that addressing hunger, hidden hunger, and child undernutrition should be a part of every policymaker’s COVID-19 response. (Read Blog)

>> Read More Blogs

COVID-19 Podcast Episode Now Available
IFPRI has released a special COVID podcast episode, featuring Xiaobo Zhang and Rob Vos talking about how their teams are conducting research in an era of lockdowns and social distancing. (Listen to the Episode)

New IFPRI Board Chair
IFPRI welcomes long-time Board member Emorn Udomkesmalee as Chairperson of its Board of Trustees. Dr. Udomkesmalee is a Senior Advisor to and a former Director of the Institute of Nutrition at Mahidol University, in Thailand. IFPRI thanks outgoing Chair Mari Pangestu for her service. (Read Board Bios)

2019 Annual Report Released
IFPRI’s 2019 Annual Report showcases how the Institute’s cutting-edge research around the world is informing policies, programs, and interventions to end hunger and poverty. (View Interactive and Report)

We know that food systems around the world are affected… but the way they are disrupted by COVID-19 is quite different. It differs by commodities, it differs by geographies, it differs by rich and poor countries…. If we want to help the poor, we have to do it right.” – Jo Swinnen, Director General, IFPRI (Event)

The COVID-19 crisis is really a global crisis and it has put even more light on the problem of inequalities we have within countries and across countries. How are we going to manage inequalities, especially in the coming years when we will have to deal with all the debt that we are generating today?” – David Laborde, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI (Event)

This year…has exposed weaknesses in the existing economic system. There is a need for a more comprehensive, coordinated global response. Trade should be part of this, but also there is a need for more predictable and equitable rules on domestic support as it creates distortions in the markets.” – Valeria Piñeiro, Senior Research Coordinator, IFPRI (Event)

The interconnection between nutrition policy and agriculture is ever so important, even though we’re now in crisis mode. We now have a major challenge in not missing the planting season in a lot of African countries to ensure self-sufficiency and food supply. We need to keep markets open for people to access their food, and to look at income.” – Paul van de Logt, Head of Food and Nutrition Security, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Government of the Netherlands (Event)

The pandemic should very much be seen as an opportunity to learn what works and what doesn’t to fight other public health crises in the region that are much more frequent in African cities, such as cholera and typhoid outbreaks that typically are blamed on informal food traders.” – Danielle Resnick, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI (Event)