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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.

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Emily Schmidt

Emily Schmidt is a Senior Research Fellow in the Development Strategies and Governance Unit. Her most recent research explores household livelihood strategies in Papua New Guinea, including linkages between agriculture, poverty, and nutrition outcomes among rural smallholder farmers.

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Projects

This project identifies methods and tools related to the prioritization of agricultural investment taking into account multiple objectives, including income growth, poverty reduction, and improved nutrition. The project has two phases and is designed to assist the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) in its efforts to expand and revitalize its portfolio of investments in the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors with nutritional considerations.

Phase 1 includes nine papers by IFPRI. One paper summarized the evidence for the positive impact on agricultural investment on income and poverty reduction, a second paper on the methods of assessing the impact of agricultural investments, and three papers describing and illustrating tools for prioritization of agricultural investment across commodities, by types of investment, and by region.

The “Nutrition” component includes four papers. The first summarized the evidence on the linkages between child nutrition and economic growth and returns to nutritional investments. The second uses benefit-cost analyses to estimate the returns to selected nutritional investments (studied as part of the Lancet Series) in Africa and Southern Asia. The third empirically examines the determinants of child undernutrition in Africa, focusing on nutritional and dietary outcomes of children in different farming systems. As part of a case study from Burkina Faso, the fourth paper constructs indicators of urbanization using remotely sensed data to empirically examine the link between urbanization and child nutrition.

The results from these nine papers were presented at a series of IFPRI-MCC seminars, at an invited session of the 31st International Conference of Agricultural Economists, at the 2021 conference of the Applied and Agricultural Economics Association, and at a side event of the Borlaug Dialogue.

Phase 2 of the project will provide support for IFPRI and MCC to collaborate in applying the evidence, methods and tools from Phase 1 to inform Compact design and evaluate possible nutrition-sensitive agricultural investments in countries where MCC operates.

Project duration: Phase 1: 2018-2021 Phase 2: 2021-2023

Contact

Rob Vos

Funders

Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)

Publications

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Working Paper

Guatemala: The impact of covid-19 and other shocks, and policy implications: Final report

2022Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Flores, Luis; Piñeiro, Valeria; Centurión, Miriam
Details

Guatemala: The impact of covid-19 and other shocks, and policy implications: Final report

Two previous reports (Díaz Bonilla, Laborde and Piñeiro, 2021, and Diaz-Bonilla, Flores, Paz, Piñeiro, and Zandstra, 2021) covered the evolution and impacts of the pandemic on food systems in Guatemala until the time of their writing (which together covered from the start of the pandemic in early 2020 until about October 2021. This third report concludes the analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems in Guatemala. It summarizes the previous reports and updates the analysis until the end of May 2022. However, this country and its food systems have also been affected by other events since the pandemic started in early 2020. Between 3 and 17 November 2020, tropical storms Eta and Iota hit Guatemalan territory with heavy rains that led to floods and mud landslides, affecting 16 of the country’s 22 departments. Later, in 2021 the strong world economic rebound due to expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in the USA and many other developed and developing countries combined with persistent strains on value chains due to COVID19 to lead to increases in transportation costs and the prices of food, energy, and fertilizers. In the case of agricultural products, those increases were com-pounded by adverse climate events in some important producers, particularly in South America. Finally, the Russian-Ukraine Conflict (RUC) on February 24, 2022, has added further pressures on the prices of energy, fertilizers and food products including wheat and vegetable oils. Therefore, the pandemic’s specific impact on Guatemala’s food systems has been interacting with the other developments mentioned, making it very difficult to differentiate among them. Policymakers, how-ever, need to respond to the overall impact of the conditions affecting the population, whatever the leading causes may be. Therefore, this final report, while emphasizing those aspects linked to the pan-demic, will discuss the conditions in Guatemala considering those other factors. This report is structured as follows. First, it summarizes the main policy responses, costs, and financing related to the COVID-19 shock. Second, it brings up to date the evolution of the pandemic, using differ-ent indicators. Third, it updates the evolution of key economic and nutritional variables. Fourth, there is a brief discussion of the implications of RUC for food systems.. Fifth, the report continues with a more specific analysis of the evolution of some food value chains that are central for food consumption in Guatemala. The next section discusses policy considerations for health, poverty and nutrition, and food value chains, based on the updated analysis of the previous sections, including cost and financial as-pects. A final section concludes.

Year published

2022

Authors

Díaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Flores, Luis; Piñeiro, Valeria; Centurión, Miriam

Citation

Diaz-Bonilla, Eugenio; Flores, Luis; Piñeiro, Valeria; and Centurion, Miriam. Guatemala: The impact of covid-19 and other shocks, and policy implications: Final report. LAC Working Paper 28. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136358.

Country/Region

Guatemala

Keywords

Latin America; Central America; Northern America; Agricultural Value Chains; Policies; Covid-19; Health; Nutrition; Poverty; Monetary Policies; Pandemics; Food Systems

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Links

https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.136358 Source record

Record type

Working Paper

Article has an altmetric score of 1
Resource thumbnail

Working Paper

Geographic prioritization of agricultural investments

2021Maruyama, Eduardo; Scollard, Phoebe
Details

Geographic prioritization of agricultural investments

Through the Notification of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the project “Advisory Services – Program Management for Development and Implementation within the Agricultural Sector” (DCO-PR-18-0293) issued a to the International Food Research Institute (IFPRI), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) described a series of information needs and how IFPRI could provide research and analysis that would help the MCC maximize the effectiveness of their agricultural interventions. This report focuses on how agricultural investment should be prioritized across territories within countries to maximize economic returns. With this purpose in mind, we develop a spatial and economic tool for strategic analysis and visioning to help understand where the best opportunities for investments in agriculture, with specific examples for investments in irrigation and roads in Ethiopia and Malawi. For such investments to be effective for poverty alleviation, it is necessary that they lead to farm-level increases in productivity and are translated into higher incomes and better livelihoods for rural households. Our proposed approach utilizes stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) to estimate smallholders’ agricultural potential under optimal conditions and compare it with their current performance to assess their efficiency levels. SFA allows the econometric exploration of the notion that, given fixed local agroecological and economic conditions in a region and the occurrence of random shocks that affect agricultural production, the decisions farmers and policymakers make translate into higher or lower production and profits. Inefficiency is then defined as the loss incurred by operating away from an ideal production frontier, and by estimating where this frontier lies, and how far each producer is from it, SFA helps to identify local potential and efficiency levels to construct the typology. For this report, we show how this approach can allow us to compare estimated agricultural potential and efficiency levels under current conditions and hypothetical investment scenarios and calculate what are the agricultural profit gains linked to each case. We can then extrapolate these results at the regional level for the whole country and combine them with GIS data on local agroecological conditions, water availability, topography, and road infrastructure to construct our typology. In particular, we use our typology results to assess where investments in agriculture would be more effective in bringing rural households out of poverty (closing the poverty gap), and how two different types of investments can increase rural households’ incomes through an increase in the profitability of smallholder agriculture. The first scenario looks at the impact of an increase in access to irrigation through river diversion methods, while the second scenario looks at the impact of an increase in market access, which we simulate by analyzing what would be the impact of reducing travel time to the nearest market (city of least 25,000 inhabitants) from any farm in the country by 50%. For Ethiopia, we find pockets of considerable unattained farm profits located throughout the central and western parts of the country, where opportunities for investments to close efficiency gaps in agricultural production and marketing can yield high returns. Low potential in the eastern lowlands limit opportunities for gains from efficiency-oriented investments, and development efforts in these regions should be focused in long-term, large scale interventions that shift the agricultural frontier. With respect to poverty alleviation, our results show that for many regions in the country, especially in the high central plateau, investing in increasing the efficiency of smallholders would be enough to close the poverty gap. In contrast, many areas in the Somali, Tigray, Afar, Oromia, and SNNP regions would require unrealistically high shifts in their agricultural potential due to its current low level combined in many cases with higher than average poverty gaps. The results from the improved irrigation access scenario are heavily constrained by the surface water availability constraint and show that the largest impacts would be observed in Somali and Afar, while in the case of the improved market access scenario, these benefits would extend to Tigray as well. For Malawi, our maps show higher agricultural potential in the Northern and Central regions of the country, consistent with the higher precipitation levels and the agroecological suitability for horticulture in the Kasungu Lilongwe Plain (central), and the staple crop producing areas in the north (such as Chipita). The southern region suffers from lower potential due to poorer general weather conditions and lower rainfall levels. The unattained potential map shows that despite high levels of efficiency, potential in the north is high enough for the remaining gap to be significant, and that the levels of efficiency in the southern tip of the country are low enough to offer some opportunities for efficiency enhancing investments in those areas as well. The poverty analysis shows that the incidence and depth of poverty are higher in the Southern Region of Malawi, but that the poverty gap in all districts of the country could be closed by investing in efficiency enhancing interventions in agriculture without depending on investments that shift the agricultural profit frontier. The results from the improved irrigation access scenario show a larger impact in the Central Region of the country, particularly the districts of Kasungu, Dowa, and Salima, while the improved market access scenario benefits are more evenly spread out across the country.

Year published

2021

Authors

Maruyama, Eduardo; Scollard, Phoebe

Citation

Maruyama, Eduardo; and Schollard, Phoebe. 2021. Geographic prioritization of agricultural investments. IFPRI – MCC Technical Paper Series: Prioritizing Agricultural Investments for Income, Poverty Reduction, and Nutrition 5. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). https://purl.umn.edu/315292.

Country/Region

Ethiopia; Malawi

Keywords

Sub-saharan Africa; Africa; Eastern Africa; Southern Africa; Models; Investment; Agriculture; Poverty

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Working Paper

Impacts of agricultural investments on growth and poverty: A review of literature

2021Martin, Will
Details

Impacts of agricultural investments on growth and poverty: A review of literature

Agricultural development is crucial in developing countries, and particularly in the poorest countries where it accounts for large shares of employment and income and whose poverty is due simply to having a large share of the workforce in low-productivity agriculture. Raising productivity in agriculture is critically important for development, as is smoothly moving workers out of agriculture into more productive employment in other sectors. Raising agricultural productivity helps both to raise incomes and to reduce poverty-both by raising the incomes of poor people working in agriculture and by lowering the prices of foods that make up a disproportionately large share of the expenditures of poor people. In small and open economies, the in-crease in profitability of agriculture following improvements in productivity might tend to retain or even attract workers into agriculture. By contrast, at a global level, or at national level when focusses on self-sufficiency, improvements in agricultural productivity will free up labor for employment in other sectors. Incomes are generally much higher in non-agricultural work in developing countries-more than double those in agriculture after careful adjustment for key differences. This raises the possibility of a double dividend from structural transformation as workers move into higher-productivity activities. A key question for development is whether it is enough to simply evaluate the gains from higher productivity within agriculture, or whether potential benefits from structural change be included as well. This paper examines the arguments on this question. It concludes that these dividends may be substantial-but whether they are or not depends on the source of the initial differences in productivity and on the direction of movement when agricultural productivity rises. If it results from barriers such as restrictions on the transfer of farmland or requirements for residence permits in urban areas, there are likely to be substantial welfare gains when labor moves out of agriculture. They may also be substantial if urban wages are artificially high and attract substantial numbers of job-waiters into unemployment. However, these gains may be illusory if the income gaps arise primarily from differences in skills or from reluctance to move created by asset fixity.

Year published

2021

Authors

Martin, Will

Citation

Martin, Will. 2021. Impacts of agricultural investments on growth and poverty: A review of literature. IFPRI – MCC Technical Paper Series: Prioritizing Agricultural Investments for Income, Poverty Reduction, and Nutrition 1. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134778.

Keywords

Income; Models; Economic Growth; Investment; Agriculture; Agricultural Productivity; Poverty

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.2499/p15738coll2.134778 Source record

Project

Policies, Institutions, and Markets

Record type

Working Paper

Funders

Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC)

Team members

Rob Vos

Rob Vos

Senior Research Fellow, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions

Nicholas Minot

Nicholas Minot

Senior Research Fellow, Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions

Will Martin

Will Martin

Senior Research Fellow, Markets,
Trade, and Institutions

Valeria Piñeiro

Valeria Piñeiro

Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), Latin
America and the Caribbean, Markets, Trade, and Institutions

Zhe Guo

Zhe Guo

Senior GIS Coordinator, Foresight
and Policy Modeling

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