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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.

Ahmed Akhter

researcher spotlight

Akhter Ahmed

Akhter Ahmed is a Senior Research Fellow in the IFPRI’s Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit and Country Representative for IFPRI Bangladesh. He has worked on strategies for agricultural and rural development, social protection, and women’s empowerment to reduce poverty, food insecurity, and undernutrition in developing countries including Bangladesh, China, Egypt, India, Malawi, the Philippines, and Turkey.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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Development Strategies and Governance

Ben Belton

Research Fellow

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Ben Belton

Bio

Ben Belton is a Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit, based in Dhaka. He is an applied interdisciplinary social scientist with more than 15 years’ field experience living and working in South and Southeast Asia, in countries including Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Viet Nam, India, Cambodia, and Malaysia. Ben is a leading global scholar on aquaculture and fisheries development. His research interests are broad, spanning value chains, food systems, livelihoods, rural transformation, agrarian change, and their links to food and nutrition security, poverty, well-being, and the environment. He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed journal articles on these subjects, using a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to develop an evidence base for effective policy actions. In addition to his role at IFPRI, Ben holds a joint appointment as Associate Professor, International Development at the Department of Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics, Michigan State University.

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Publications

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Brief

Clustering shrimp farms in Bangladesh: A novel effort with mixed outcomes

2025Kabir, Razin; Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Sakil, Abdul Zabbar; Khan, Asraul Hoque; Hernandez, Ricardo
Details

Clustering shrimp farms in Bangladesh: A novel effort with mixed outcomes

Organizing smallholder farmers in clusters has been widely promoted as a way to boost agricultural productivity, streamline delivery of extension services, and improve access to markets. In Bangladesh, where shrimp is an important export crop produced largely by smallholders, government and industry view clustering as key to preventing Bangladesh being left behind in an increasingly competitive global market. Bangladesh’s shrimp exports are highly dependent on the hotel, restaurant, and catering (HoReCa) sector in Europe—a small and relatively low value market segment. Gaining access to the much larger and potentially more lucrative retail market segment in Europe and North America requires high quality, traceable, and – increasingly – certified, shrimp, posing a challenging for Bangladesh.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kabir, Razin; Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Sakil, Abdul Zabbar; Khan, Asraul Hoque; Hernandez, Ricardo

Citation

Kabir, Razin; Belton, Ben; Narayanan, Sudha; Sakil, Abdul Zabbar; Khan, Asraul Hoque; and Hernandez, Ricardo. 2025. Clustering shrimp farms in Bangladesh: A novel effort with mixed outcomes. South Asia Policy Perspectives 4. New Delhi, India: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/174761

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Smallholders; Agricultural Productivity; Markets; Extension Systems; Shrimp Culture; Exports

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Brief

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Journal Article

Wholesalers and the transformation of Myanmar’s maize value chains

2025Belton, Ben; Cho, Ame; Hall, Michael; Minten, Bart; Reardon, Thomas
Details

Wholesalers and the transformation of Myanmar’s maize value chains

Wholesalers of agricultural crops have historically received limited attention in the literature on agricultural development, which has a strongly productivist focus. When wholesalers are considered, they are often framed as exploitative, taking advantage of information asymmetries, market failures, and unequal power relations to extract heavy surpluses from farmers. However, there is a growing appreciation that wholesalers may play important roles in facilitating agricultural development and rural transformation. This paper evaluates wholesaler conduct and performance using a survey of 218 maize wholesalers in 12 of the major maize-growing and trading townships of South Shan State, Myanmar and the cities of Lashio and Muse in North Shan. Hybrid maize emerged very rapidly in Myanmar over the past two decades to become a major cash crop, supplying domestic animal feed mills and becoming one of Myanmar’s most important exports to China and Thailand. Wholesalers have been central to the development of this supply chain and the sector. Contrary to recent literature from Myanmar that has cast maize wholesalers as exploitative, the survey finds that the rapidly growing wholesaler segment of the maize value chain is highly competitive, rapidly changing with respect to technology, and functions efficiently. Farmers obtaining maize inputs from wholesalers in the form of tied output credit sell their maize at prevailing market rates. The emergence of clusters of maize wholesalers and allied actors such as third-party logistics services occurred spontaneously and symbiotically with the expansion of hybrid maize cultivation, and with each set of actors essential to the emergence of the others.

Year published

2025

Authors

Belton, Ben; Cho, Ame; Hall, Michael; Minten, Bart; Reardon, Thomas

Citation

Belton, Ben; Cho, Ame; Hall, Michael; Minten, Bart; and Reardon, Thomas. 2025. Wholesalers and the transformation of Myanmar’s maize value chains. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy 47(1): 125-153. https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13489

Country/Region

Myanmar

Keywords

Asia; South-eastern Asia; Agricultural Development; Maize; Wholesale Markets; Value Chains; Small and Medium Enterprises

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1002/aepp.13489 Source record

Record type

Journal Article

Resource thumbnail

Journal Article

Does rural non-farm employment relieve or exacerbate the agricultural diversification-farm efficiency tradeoff: The case of aquaculture in Bangladesh

2025Abaidoo, Eric; Belton, Ben; Reardon, Thomas; Jin, Songqing; Malone, Trey
Details

Does rural non-farm employment relieve or exacerbate the agricultural diversification-farm efficiency tradeoff: The case of aquaculture in Bangladesh

This paper studies how rural non-farm employment conditions the relationship between agricultural diversification and fish production efficiency. Competition for scarce productive resources typically implies a compromise between agricultural diversification and efficiency. Yet, the potential for non-farm income to resolve this tradeoff remains understudied. Cash from non-farm sources may support productivity-enhancing input purchase, thereby improving efficiency. On the other hand, by diversifying both on- and off-farm, household resources such as labor may be stretched too thin, lowering fish production efficiency. Using micro-level data on fish farming households in Southern Bangladesh, we show that at higher levels of the non-farm income share, diversification into crops results in significant allocative inefficiencies. Results are inconclusive for the technical efficiency measure.

Year published

2025

Authors

Abaidoo, Eric; Belton, Ben; Reardon, Thomas; Jin, Songqing; Malone, Trey

Citation

Abaidoo, Eric; Belton, Ben; Reardon, Thomas; Jin, Songqing; and Malone, Trey. Does rural non-farm employment relieve or exacerbate the agricultural diversification-farm efficiency tradeoff: The case of aquaculture in Bangladesh. Aquaculture Economics and Management. Article in press. First available online January 5, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/13657305.2024.2446142

Country/Region

Bangladesh

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Rural Employment; Agriculture; Diversification; Aquaculture; Efficiency; Labour Allocation

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1080/13657305.2024.2446142 Source record

Record type

Journal Article