What's New

Resilience must mean more than simply bouncing back from negative shocks: that is the message from last week's 2020 Conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The conference, themed "Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security," provided a new definition of resilience, one that focuses on empowering individuals, households, and communities to become better off than they were before the shocks occurred.

Global food prices dropped slowly in April, led by sharp declines in dairy products, sugar, and vegetable oils, according to the latest FAO Food Price Index. The Index fell 1.6 percent from March.

By contrast, the Cereal Price Index rose in April by one point. However, cereal prices remain well below (10.3 percent below) their April 2013 levels. The Meat Price Index also rose in April, with pig meat prices rising and bovine meat prices near historic highs.

A farmers’ success depends on more than good weather, healthy soil, and proper seeds. Good farming also involves a series of decisions: how much to plant each season, whether to invest in new crops, which markets to sell to. The right decisions can mean the difference between a profitable harvest and a net loss in farm income. Farmers make these decisions based on their knowledge of prevailing market prices, and supply and demand trends based on produce quality.

Eight years ago, the Government of Ethiopia placed an export ban on maize and other major cereal crops. At the time, Ethiopia’s grain prices were three times higher than those on international markets. The government saw the price hikes as a symptom of trade and not high inflation rates, among other factors. But in 2013, higher-than-average Kiremt rains spurred projections of a bumper maize crop, which triggered the Ethiopian Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) to consider advising the Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) to lift the export ban for the 2014 marketing season.

At first glance, it may seem that women in northern Mozambique might enjoy more power than women in other places, at least in the agricultural sector. In this region, land is often passed through matrilineal rather than patrilineal lines. And since the enactment of the Mozambique Land Law in 1997, one might expect that women here are better able to access land and retain control over land they bring with them into marriage.