You can buy a bottle of Coca-Cola just about anywhere in the world, at an affordable price. If it can happen with Coke, why not with nutritious food? This thought, expressed by Islamic Development Bank Agriculture and Rural Development Director Demba Ba, was one of many posed by experts at a recent DuPont roundtable hosted at IFPRI about the myriad ways private-sector ingenuity can be used to reduce hunger and malnutrition around the world.

Could building Somalia’s resilience to weather shocks help bring an end to its civil war?

That’s precisely what researchers Jean-Francois Maystadt, Olivier Ecker, and Athur Mabiso discuss in their paper “Extreme Weather and Civil War in Somalia: Does Drought Fuel Conflict through Livestock Price Shocks?”.

Despite its transformation from a country of chronic food shortages to one of food self-sufficiency, Bangladesh still faces food-security challenges. This is the conclusion of a massive IFPRI-designed survey on agriculture, consumption, and nutrition in the country.

European policymakers must increase development assistance to agriculture to at least 10 percent of overseas development assistance. That was the first of several key calls to action IFPRI Director General Shenggen Fan presented to policymakers from European Union countries at a keynote presentation to the Royal Dublin Society and livecast around the world last week.

As 2015—the target date for the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—looms closer, the international community is reviewing how far we have come, and asking what new standards should be set in the development goals after 2015. Nutrition, policy, and advocacy experts recently gathered to discuss that very question.

Ethiopia faces many challenges, but the country is quickly shedding its label as one of the world’s poorest countries, finding itself today among the world’s 10 fastest growing economies. The question now at hand is how to sustain this historic growth, and emerge as a middle-income country by 2025. The Ethiopian government is turning to its leading—but one of its most underperforming— industries for the answer: agriculture.

The world’s population is growing, and we only have limited land for farming. Will we run out of food? That question, famously posed by Thomas Malthus in the early 19th century, has been discussed for decades.

A couple of weeks ago, IFPRI’s Director General Shenggen Fan participated in an online video interview with the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development, a network of donors, financing institutions, and development agencies.

Referring to IFPRI’s recently launched 2012 Global Food Policy Report, Fan discusses the positive developments in food security in 2012, and which policies—from national governments and the international community—can help and hinder food security and poverty reduction.

The next International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and IFPRI Impact Evaluation Seminar will be held on April 11 at 12:30 EST. Markus Goldstein of the World Bank will present on how a two-pronged program providing vocational training and information on health and risky behaviors impacted the health and labor outcomes of adolescent girls in Uganda.

Today, IFPRI launches West African Agriculture and Climate Change, the first of three monographs on climate change and agriculture in West, Central, and Eastern Africa. The monographs result from a research project headed by IFPRI Senior Researcher Gerald Nelson. Below Nelson talks about his research and implications for policymakers.