What's New

BY: Joseph Glauber, IFPRI

On November 9, IFPRI co-hosted a conference with the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development and FAO in Geneva on agricultural trade outcomes at the upcoming Nairobi Ministerial. The conference brought together current and former trade officials and experts from around the world to talk about the importance of trade for food security and rural development.

In the face of price spikes, climate change, and other stressors from the national to the global scale, the promotion of resilience has gained traction in the development community as a means of insuring that populations vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity are equipped with the tools to survive and even thrive in our unpredictable world.

The FAO Food Price Index averaged nearly 162 points in October, up 3.9 percent from the previous month. This was the sharpest increase since July 2012, but the index is still down 16 percent from this time last year.

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.