Evidence-Based Research

In the lead-up to last week’s G20 Agriculture Ministers Meeting, held in Berlin from January 20-22, the T20 Task Force released a policy brief calling for improved policymaking for sustainable land and water use. The authors highlighted that integrated resource-use policies are essential to achieving sustainable agricultural and ending hunger worldwide.

Climate change, disease outbreaks, price spikes, conflict - resilience to such shocks has become a widespread goal among development practitioners and policymakers, but what exactly is resilience? How can we define resilience and how can it be measured to ensure that programs and policies aimed at increasing poor populations’ resilience to shocks truly enhance food security and overall welfare?

Ensuring food and nutrition security in the face of growing populations, increasing incomes, and a changing climate will require countries to transform their food systems to be more sustainable and equitable. A 2016 report published by IFPRI and the Compact2025 Initiative looks at recent successful food system transformations in Brazil, Rwanda, and Vietnam that helped significantly reduce hunger and undernutrition in these countries. The report provides several best practices and ways forward that other countries can use to launch their own improved food systems.

Agriculture played a leading role in the UN Conference of the Parties on Climate Change (COP22), held in November in Marrakesh, Morocco. This year’s conference theme was “Africa, Adaptation, and Agriculture”; the event focused on helping countries establish specific strategies to achieve the agreement reached at COP21 (the Paris Agreement) to cap climate change below two degrees Celsius of warming in this century.

Value chain development (VCD) aims to address poverty by strengthening linkages among agricultural value chain actors (producers, laborers, traders, processors, retailers, and consumers), allowing those actors to take better advantage of market opportunities.