The current El Niño cycle is being called the one of the strongest on record, and it is already having serious impacts on local food production in many developing countries around the world. Production shortfalls, and subsequent food price hikes, will be particularly harmful for the world’s poorest consumers, who research shows spend 50-70 percent of their incomes on food. A new IFPRI brief examines some of these impacts and discusses policy options to improve countries’ resilience and food security in the face of weather- and climate-related shocks.

The global food system puts significant pressure on the world’s natural resources and is a major contributor of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, a large amount of the food produced by this system is either lost or wasted each year, lowering overall productivity and hurting both producers and consumers. According to a recent blog by IFPRI Director General Shenggen Fan, as much as one billion tons of food never reaches consumers.

Last year witnessed the culmination of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the launch of a new global development agenda – the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to IFPRI’s 2016 Global Food Policy Report (GFPR) , launched in Washington, DC last week, achieving the ambitious aims of the SDGs – which include eliminating extreme poverty, hunger, and malnutrition while encouraging sustainable growth and conserving the environment by 2030 – will require coordinated action at the global, regional, national, and local community levels.

A country’s food security conditions clearly have implications for the types of policies its leaders will try to enact and for the way that country interacts with international organizations and governing bodies. Much effort has been made to classify countries according to their food and nutrition security status in order to better guide policymaking, but determining such classifications is complicated.

Climate change has been front and center of the global agenda recently, driven by the historic COP21 meeting in Paris in December and concerns about the ongoing El Niño cycle . Agriculture is one sector that will be particularly hard hit by a changing climate and to respond and adapt to global climate change, agricultural producers (particularly those in developing countries) will need to embrace new, more sustainable technologies and practices. However, when it comes to discussing climate-smart agricultural practices, one group often seems to fall through the cracks – women.

BY: David Laborde and Eugenio Díaz-Bonilla, IFPRI

Export subsidies for agriculture have been a contentious issue. A particular anomaly in the multilateral trading system framework is that while export subsidies in industrial products have been banned under WTO rules, they are still allowed for agricultural products, including some that are rather industrialized, such as dairy and meat products.

In a new book , Macroeconomics, Agriculture, and Food Security: A Guide to Policy Analysis in Developing Countries , IFPRI’s Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla unpacks the significant and complex interplay between policies within a state’s economic program-- fiscal policy, monetary policy, exchange rate policy, and trade policy—and the impact of those relationships on agricultural development and food security.

Famine used to be the focus of efforts to combat hunger, but changes in policy, technology and aid have brought the developing world to the point where “calamitous famines” (with a death toll of one million or more) and even “great famines” (100,000 or more) are much more rare . Even so, publications such as the 2015 Global Hunger Index make it clear that malnutrition is still a problem, with 52 out of 117 countries on the index ranking alarmingly poorly on indicators of chronic malnourishment .

BY: David Laborde and Simla Tokgoz, IFPRI

Commodity prices regularly move together, despite the fact that causes of fluctuation can vary from commodity to commodity. Cross-market volatility could lower the effectiveness of diversification as a strategy for reducing price risks, so understanding the dynamics behind market interdependence and volatility transmission is critical.