What's New

On August 14, IFPRI and the Indaba Agricultural Policy Research Institute (IAPRI) held a Policy Forum on food and nutrition security in Zambia. The meeting was attended by 66 representatives of various international organizations and government ministries, including the Zambian Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock and the European Union.

At the L’Aquila G-8 summit in 2009, governments and organizations committed more than $20 billion to agriculture and rural development as a means of promoting food and nutrition security.

Within the overarching frameworks of the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative (AFSI), the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the Accra Agenda for Action, Ghana also committed to improving aid accountability and development effectiveness via “demand-driven development cooperation” and a “donor-coordinated approach.”

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.

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.