What's New

The 2016 Global Nutrition Report (GNR) , released today in Washington DC, provides an independent and annual review of the state of the world’s nutrition. The report, now in its third year, focuses on the progress made toward recent nutrition-related global commitments and identifies opportunities for action to end malnutrition in all its forms by 2030.

Soybean futures prices have seen a lot of movement in recent weeks, beginning in April when they twice saw record daily trading in combined futures and options volume on the Chicago market. Our early warning excessive food price volatility system has immediately reflected this trend, identifying extreme positive returns, i.e. returns that exceeds the 95% conditional quantile predicted by our NEXQ model . The days in which we observe excessive volatility are identified in the graph below.
Soybean Excessive Food Price Variability

On March 18, 2015, the Third UN World Conference adopted The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 . The framework is a 15-year, voluntary, non-binding agreement that aims to substantially reduce loss of lives, livelihoods, health outcomes, and physical, economic, environmental, social, and cultural assets stemming from disasters, both natural and man-made.
The framework builds on the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) 2005-2015: Building the Resilience of Nations and Communities to Disasters and sets forth seven global targets:

The G20 Agriculture Ministers met in Xi’an on June 3 to discuss the ways in which the members can promote food security, nutrition, sustainable agricultural growth and rural development worldwide. In the communique, the ministers noted an increased commitment to the Sustainable Development goals (SDGs). In particular, they noted that agriculture and rural development are critical for global food security and poverty alleviation and that coordination across political boundaries will be needed to meet the complex challenges including climate change.

The latest FAO Food Price Index , released today, rose 3.2 points from April. This is the fourth consecutive month to see a slight increase in the Index; however, prices remain 7 percent below May 2015 levels.