Evidence-Based Research

Food security and food prices are driven by a complex range of interacting factors, including weather, crop production levels, trade, and conflict. For several years, IFPRI has been studying whether and how another factor influences food prices: the media.

In 2016, for the first time in modern history, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell below 10 percent and the global rate of undernutrition was expected to fall below 11 percent, according to IFPRI’s newly released 2017 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) .

According to the latest Foresight Report from the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition (GLOPAN), three billion people around the world consume low-quality diets, and this nutrition crisis will likely only get worse in the coming decades. Population growth and climate change will place increasing stress on food systems, particularly in Africa and Asia. At the same time, rapidly increasing urbanization, particularly in these two regions, will affect hunger and nutrition in complex ways.

Since the 2007-2008 food price crisis, food price volatility has been front and center in the international development conversation. The period of the crisis saw a dramatic rise in the international price of grains and other important commodities, while the years immediately following the crisis saw increasing grain price fluctuations on the international market.

This post was first published on the Africa South of the Sahara Food Security Portal