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2023 Global Food Policy Report: Rethinking Food Crisis Responses

Economic crises, epidemics, conflicts, and extreme weather events can wreak havoc on food systems, in particular when several of these shocks overlap. Food system shocks risk increasing food insecurity, hunger, and malnutrition, and can disrupt livelihoods, increase poverty, and further diminish prospects for the world’s most vulnerable populations. Governments and the international community, including research organizations such as IFPRI, support efforts to better predict, monitor, and respond to crises as they arise, but these efforts often are not sustained when the crises end.

Introducing pro-WEAI complementary indicators for nutrition- sensitive agriculture and market inclusion projects

The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) is the first-ever direct measure of women’s empowerment and inclusion in the agriculture sector. In response to demand from designers and implementors of agricultural development projects, IFPRI developed the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) to track the impacts of these projects on women’s empowerment.

Ugandan woman in blue headscarf tends tomato plans in foreground

What Is the Investment Needed to End Chronic Hunger?

In 2019, an estimated 690 million people around the world were undernourished, and nearly 3 billion people were unable to afford healthy diets. The world has the potential to make significant progress in reducing those numbers by 2030 – with the right investments.

The global food price crisis threatens to cause a global nutrition crisis: New evidence from 1.27 million young children on the effects of inflation

Frequent food crises with spiking prices have become the new normal in the 21st century, bringing urgency to the task of understanding their nutritional impacts on poor and food insecure populations. In a new analysis of 1.27 million children in 44 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) we show that exposure to food inflation in the womb and first years of life is associated with greater risks of child wasting in the short run and stunting in the long run.

Harmful Environmental Impacts of Agricultural Subsidies

Agricultural subsidies are high—and increasing—and are largely concentrated among relatively few commodities in a handful of countries. The negative impacts of these subsidies on production and trade are widely known, but their environmental impacts are less well understood.

G20 Agriculture Ministers underscore importance of food system sustainability, open and fair trade, and digital innovations as long-term food crisis responses

Even as the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic dissipate, the world continues to face a severe food security crisis, exacerbated by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, putting it further off track to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2—ending hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030.

Policy seminars: As global food prices rise, important new data addresses the affordability of healthy diets

High food price inflation—driven by disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic, climate shocks, and the war in Ukraine—has made the affordability of food and food insecurity top global concerns. Even before the current rise in prices, 3.1 billion people, about 40% of the global population, could not afford a healthy diet, according to the United Nation’s 2022 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report.

Are healthy diets affordable? Using new data on retail prices and diet costs to guide agricultural and food policy

New Food Prices for Nutrition data in the SOFI 2022 report launched on July 6th uses retail food prices to compute diet costs and the number of people who cannot afford a healthy diet globally. Underlying costs by food group will be published simultaneously on a new Food Prices for Nutrition DataHub hosted at the World Bank, and subnational data are being used for a wide range of in-country research across Africa and Asia.

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