Food insecurity poses a daunting challenge to the G20’s goals of global economic growth and development. The impacts of high and volatile food prices in 2007-2008 and 2010-2011 remain widely visible, as seen during the 2011 Horn of Africa food crisis. Since 2001, commodity price volatility has been at its highest level in 50 years. This volatility can serve to reduce investments in agriculture, discourage long-term planning, reduce agricultural productivity, and decrease global food stocks.

Some experts believed that by 2010, up to 50 million “environmental refugees” would flee their lands due to the dramatically negative effects of climate change. Such claims, however, are not based on the actual responses of households and communities to climate change but on broad estimates of the number of people “at risk” from the changing climate.

A Spanish-language version of the popular CGIAR Program on Collective Action and Property Rights (CAPRi) sourcebook is now available.

The sourcebook, Recursos, derechos y cooperación Manual de herramientas de referencia sobre derechos de propiedad y acción colectiva para el desarrollo sustentable, illustrates—through text and original hand-drawings—the lessons the CAPRi program has learned from its nearly 16 years of extensive field work and research on the role of the poor in the sustainable management of land and other resources in the developing world.

Why do some people fall into the trap of chronic poverty and others are able to escape it? IFPRI convened a panel of experts yesterday to shed some light on factors that lead to chronic poverty, and policy actions that may help pull households out of it.

The panel included Bob Baulch from the Chronic Poverty Research Center, IFPRI’s Agnes Quisumbing, and Catherine Porter from Oxford University, and was moderated by IFPRI’s John Hoddinott.