Given the widespread interest in the projections of the world food situation from IFPRI's International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT), the institute has developed a distributable version of the model and made it available on the IFPRI website. Users can download the IMPACT Distributed Version (or IMPACT-D) and use it to develop and run their own scenario analyses without knowing high-level math computer programming.

IMPACT-D currently includes 36 world regions and 32 commodities and allows users to adjust assumptions for growth in (1) yield, (2) crop area/herd size, (3) irrigation, (4) population, and (5) national income by time period (for assumptions made for 1, 2 and 4), by region (for all assumptions), and by commodity (for assumptions made for 1–3).

IMPACT-D works on top of freeware versions of the main software packages used for the model. After developing their own scenarios, users can store the results in separate Excel files, and the program automatically generates a standard-format summary page in the output Excel file.

For more information, go to www.ifpri.org/themes/impact/impactd.asp.