What's New

Scientists, advocates, researchers, and political leaders are preparing to head to Paris for Conference of Parties (COP21) as the impacts of heat, drought, and other extreme weather events-- climate challenges that once seemed a concern for the distant future-- are becoming more immediate. The impacts of climate change on agricultural commodities and trade need to be analyzed in the context of implications for agricultural production, food security, and resource use.

In a new book , Macroeconomics, Agriculture, and Food Security: A Guide to Policy Analysis in Developing Countries , IFPRI’s Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla unpacks the significant and complex interplay between policies within a state’s economic program-- fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy, and trade policy—and the impact of those relationships on agricultural development and food security.

In addition to continued coverage of bumper harvests and low prices in grain markets, the October edition of the FAO Monthly News Report on Grains included the increasing impacts of adverse weather on current harvests and 2016 forecasts.

The FAO Monthly News Report on Grains provides a collection of news articles on issues or factors considered critical in shaping the regional/global grains economy, as well as links to reports, statistics, and upcoming events.

The World Bank released some good news this month regarding extreme global poverty. In the report “Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies,” the Bank predicts that by the end of 2015, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide will drop from 902 million (the 2012 level) to 702 million, or 9.6 percent of the global population.

Famine used to be the focus of efforts to combat hunger, but changes in policy, technology and aid have brought the developing world to the point where “calamitous famines” (with a death toll of one million or more) and even “great famines” (100,000 or more) are much more rare . Even so, publications such as the 2015 Global Hunger Index make it clear that malnutrition is still a problem, with 52 out of 117 countries on the index ranking alarmingly poorly on indicators of chronic malnourishment .