Food Policy Analysis Tools

As the world deals with the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, the international community has started discussing more urgently how land use change and the conversion of natural habitats to agricultural or urban ecosystems can affect the risk and emergence of zoonotic diseases in humans as well as the spread of new pathogens and diseases in livestock.

The Excessive Food Price Variability Early Warning System is a tool of the Food Security Portal that identifies periods of excessive price variability (i.e. price variability that exceeds a pre-established threshold), and it is updated on a daily basis to identify days that are within periods of high, moderate, and low price variability.

The stock-to-use ratio is an important indicator of the vulnerability of world food markets to shocks. The ratio represents the level of carryover stock of a given commodity as a percentage of the total use of that commodity.

The Early Warning Hub brings together information from across Early Warning Systems in one place. Early Warning Systems (EWS) alert to the presence of food crises and related drivers, informing decision makers and saving lives.

The Food Price Monitor provides daily updates of prices in wholesale and retail markets for a wide range of food products. Alerts refer to price changes from the start of social distancing measures taken because of COVID-19 and are based on a pre-COVID-19 reference price.

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads, social and economic relief measures—including fiscal stimulus and expansion of social safety nets—are crucial to prevent poverty and hunger from rising dramatically in developing countries.

The control panel for real-time monitoring of risk factors is an innovative tool that brings together information on various drivers of food crises, including conflict and climate-related shocks.

While the impact of rising food prices may be clear, the root causes of such price increases often are not. The role of various short- and long-term factors, such as the growth of commodities futures markets and changing levels of grain stocks, continues to be debated. This tool generates up-to-date media daily analysis of factors that may influence commodity price volatility and food security related to COVID-19.

During the current COVID-19 crisis, some national governments have moved to restrict food exports. This behavior can, in aggregate, have dire unintended consequences for vulnerable people in food-importing countries, increasing prices and exacerbating issues of food insecurity already inflamed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It may also negatively affect producers in the export-restricting countries. Similar trade policies contributed to the 2007-2008 food price crisis; may history not repeat itself.

The spread of COVID-19, as well as the wide range of policy responses enacted around the world to contain the pandemic, have exerted wide-ranging effects on agri-food systems and livelihoods.

The International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and aTrade (IMPACT) explores policies that can help feed the world, reduce poverty, and protect the natural resource base. Here we examine how alternative investment scenarios affect agricultural production, productivity, and food security for the period 2010-2050 compared to a reference scenario.

The fight against hunger is not over yet. A fight against overweight and obesity must begin. Here you can find how patterns of malnutrition are evolving across the globe.

The IFPRI Food Security Media Analysis System was developed in collaboration with GATE group from the University of Sheffield to analyze media coverage of food security, food prices, and hunger. This powerful software combination uses sophisticated linguistic and semantic object network-mapping algorithms to analyze the relationships between key terms found in media articles that may influence commodity price volatility.

The Food Loss and Waste database is the largest online collection of data on both food loss and food waste and causes reported throughout the literature. The database contains data and information from openly accessible reports and studies measuring food loss and waste across food products, stages of the value chain, and geographical areas.

The IPC Population Tracking Tool is a new online platform that gives the public access to population data from more than 30 different countries. It allows users to download resource data for offline IPC analyses from the past three years. All national population figures are based on official country population estimates. IPC estimates are those published in country IPC reports.