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With research staff from more than 60 countries, and offices across the globe, IFPRI provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries.

Erick Boy

researcher spotlight

Erick Boy

Erick Boy is the Chief Nutritionist in the HarvestPlus section of the Innovation Policy and Scaling Unit. As head of nutrition for the HarvestPlus Program since 2008, he has led research that has generated scientific evidence on biofortified staple crops as efficacious and effective interventions to help address iron, vitamin A, and zinc deficiency in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and South Asia.

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Since 1975, IFPRI’s research has been informing policies and development programs to improve food security, nutrition, and livelihoods around the world.

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IFPRI currently has more than 600 employees working in over 80 countries with a wide range of local, national, and international partners.

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Publications

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Journal Article

Confidence and information usage: Evidence from soil testing in India

2025Gars, Jared; Fishman, Ram; Kishore, Avinash; Rothler, Yoav; Ward, Patrick S.
Details

Confidence and information usage: Evidence from soil testing in India

Informational barriers are often considered to be a major constraint to the adoption of improved farming practices, inputs, and technologies by smallholder farmers. In the Indian context, it is widely believed that farmers misapply chemical fertilizers because they lack scientific information on soil conditions and corresponding fertilizer recommendations, thus resulting in imbalanced and potentially detrimental fertilizer application. Policymakers are frequently interested in providing farmers with various streams of information to overcome these informational barriers to optimize farming activities. However, such informational interventions frequently fail either because generic recommendations may be ill-suited for decision makers in highly heterogeneous agricultural environments or because farmers’ beliefs may be so entrenched as to make them unresponsive to new information. We implemented a field experiment in Bihar, India to test whether plot-specific fertilizer recommendations affect farmers’ fertilizer use. We find little evidence for sizable impacts on fertilizer use in general, though impacts are more apparent for low cost or costless recommendations such as increasing the use of highly subsidized fertilizers or shifting the timing of application. Despite modest evidence of such effects, even those fall short of their potential magnitude. We show that treated farmers who are less confident in their subjective beliefs about optimal fertilizer application rates (i.e., with more disperse priors) are more responsive to the recommendations and have a higher ex ante willingness to pay for soil testing. These results suggest that heterogeneity in beliefs may constrain the overall effectiveness of information provision, even when the information is tailored to individual farms. JEL Classification: D83, O13

Year published

2025

Authors

Gars, Jared; Fishman, Ram; Kishore, Avinash; Rothler, Yoav; Ward, Patrick S.

Citation

Gars, Jared; Fishman, Ram; Kishore, Avinash; Rothler, Yoav; and Ward, Patrick S. 2025. Confidence and information usage: Evidence from soil testing in India. American Journal of Agricultural Economics 107(5): 1406-1437. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12513

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Fertilizers; Soil Analysis; Smallholders

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.1111/ajae.12513 Source record

Project

National Policies and Strategies

Record type

Journal Article

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Working Paper

Women’s leadership in agrifood governance: Unpacking gender attitudes and framing effects among policymakers with evidence from India and Nigeria

2025Kyle, Jordan; Ragasa, Catherine
Details

Women’s leadership in agrifood governance: Unpacking gender attitudes and framing effects among policymakers with evidence from India and Nigeria

Women’s leadership in policy processes and formal institutions is a powerful pathway to gender equality and women’s empowerment at scale, yet relatively little is known about how key decision-makers who influence access to these positions perceive women’s leadership and how those perceptions can shift. This paper draws on original survey data from 407 elites from 274 agrifood organizations in India and Nigeria to examine elite gender attitudes, their responsiveness to framing interventions, and how these attitudes relate to support for policies promoting gender equality. Specifically, we ask: how do elites in agrifood governance perceive women’s leadership, and how responsive are these perceptions to a targeted framing intervention? We find that elites are substantially more supportive of women’s leadership than the general public in the same countries, yet male elites in particular still express strong endorsement of the idea that men make better leaders. Over half of male elites in our sample in both countries agree that men make better political leaders. A randomized framing experiment embedded in the survey shows that men’s attitudes toward women’s leadership are significantly influenced by how women’s capabilities are framed. Messages emphasizing women’s equal rights and capabilities reduce male elites’ support for gender-unequal statements compared to frames that ask individuals to reject the idea of male superiority. Female elites’ attitudes are more supportive overall and unaffected by framing. These findings suggest that gender messaging strategies should center on positive, equality-based frames, and that elite attitudes are critical to scaling women’s leadership in agrifood governance.

Year published

2025

Authors

Kyle, Jordan; Ragasa, Catherine

Citation

Kyle, Jordan; and Ragasa, Catherine. 2025. Women’s leadership in agrifood governance: Unpacking gender attitudes and framing effects among policymakers with evidence from India and Nigeria. IFPRI Discussion Paper 2354. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute. https://hdl.handle.net/10568/176312

Country/Region

India; Nigeria

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Africa; Western Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Agriculture; Gender Equality; Governance; Leadership; Policy Innovation; Surveys; Women’s Empowerment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Record type

Working Paper

Resource thumbnail

Brief

Leveraging project insights to strengthen WEAI for climate research

2025
Koxha, Leona; O’Connor, Eileen; Alvi, Muzna; Chadha, Deepali; Ewell, Hanna; Gartaula, Hom Nath; Ketema, Dessalegn; Lutomia, Cosmas; Mukhopadhyay, Prama; Nchanji, Eileen
…more Puskur, Ranjitha; Rietveld, Anne M.; Sufian, Farha
Details

Leveraging project insights to strengthen WEAI for climate research

Key messages • Measuring women’s empowerment in the context of climate change, resilience, and adaptation requires a flexible climate module—not a rigid, universal set of indicators. • Collective agency, community involvement, and social networks are critical to climate resilience. The project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) should expand its climate module to better capture these community dynamics and collective actions. • Integrating qualitative methods strengthens pro-WEAI’s effectiveness and ensures the tool is tailored to local contexts, which is essential for collecting meaningful and holistic data.

Year published

2025

Authors

Koxha, Leona; O’Connor, Eileen; Alvi, Muzna; Chadha, Deepali; Ewell, Hanna; Gartaula, Hom Nath; Ketema, Dessalegn; Lutomia, Cosmas; Mukhopadhyay, Prama; Nchanji, Eileen; Puskur, Ranjitha; Rietveld, Anne M.; Sufian, Farha

Citation

Koxha, Leona; O’Connor, Eileen; Alvi, Muzna; Chadha, Deepali; Ewell, Hanna; Gartaula, Hom Nath; et al. 2025. Leveraging project insights to strengthen WEAI for climate research. WEAI Applications and Insights Brief 4. Washington, DC: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). https://hdl.handle.net/10568/176145

Country/Region

Ethiopia; Kenya; India

Keywords

Africa; Sub-saharan Africa; Eastern Africa; Asia; Southern Asia; Women’s Empowerment; Climate Change; Resilience

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open Access

Source

Source record

Project

Gender

Record type

Brief

Datasets

Dataset

TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Market Survey

2024International Rice Research Institute; International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Market Survey

TAFSSA (Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia) is a CGIAR Regional Integrated Initiative aimed at advancing equitable access to sustainable healthy diets, enhancing farmers’ livelihoods and resilience, and conserving natural resources such as land, air, and water across South Asia. The TAFSSA district agrifood systems assessment seeks to establish a robust, accessible, and integrated evidence base that connects farm production, market access, dietary patterns, climate risk responses, and natural resource management, with gender considerations integrated throughout. The assessment focuses on rural areas in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, utilizing a district-level, multi-year approach. Data collection took place between February and June 2023 in the Nalanda district of Bihar, India. The survey covered 50 villages in the district, focusing on formal and informal multi-vendor markets offering various food products within a 10-kilometer radius of the village centroid. The types of multi-vendor markets included village markets, weekly village markets, roadside/street markets, and wholesale markets (mandis). The survey employed pretested, structured questionnaires divided into three distinct modules: 1. Interview-Based Module: Collected data on vendor information, assortments of essential goods, availability, resilience, food sourcing, food wastage, and dimensions of access and protection. 2. Observation + Photo Module: Documented market information, infrastructure, and the quality, safety, and hygiene of the market. 3. Food List Module: Recorded the availability and prices of a comprehensive list of food items found at the location.

Year published

2024

Authors

International Rice Research Institute; International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

International Rice Research Institute (IRRI); International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 2024. TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Market Survey. Washington, DC: IFPRI [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TYDNVO. Harvard Dataverse. Version 1.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agrifood Systems; Diet; Food Security; Gender Equality; Natural Resources; Climate Change; Waste Disposal; Market Access; Infrastructure

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/tydnvo Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Dataset

Dataset

TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Local Market and Retail Census

2024International Rice Research Institute; International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Local Market and Retail Census

TAFSSA (Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia) is a CGIAR Regional Integrated Initiative aimed at advancing equitable access to sustainable healthy diets, enhancing farmers’ livelihoods and resilience, and conserving natural resources such as land, air, and water across South Asia. The TAFSSA district agrifood systems assessment seeks to establish a robust, accessible, and integrated evidence base that connects farm production, market access, dietary patterns, climate risk responses, and natural resource management, with gender considerations integrated throughout. The assessment focuses on rural areas in Bangladesh, India, and Nepal, utilizing a district-level, multi-year approach. In December 2022–January 2023, data collection was conducted in the Nalanda district of Bihar, India. A census was carried out in 50 villages selected using probability proportional to the number of households in each village. The census included all formal and informal multi-vendor markets offering a variety of food products, as well as retail food shops in the selected villages. The types of multi-vendor markets covered included village markets, weekly village markets, roadside/street markets, and wholesale markets (mandis). Retail shops included local grocery stores, vegetable/fruit shops (green grocers), and specialized shops selling meat, eggs, fish, or dairy products. The census employed pretested, structured questionnaires to gather data. Information collected included market density, vendor details, opening hours and days, products sold, infrastructure and facilities in shops, waste disposal methods, and GPS coordinates of the retail shops and markets.

Year published

2024

Authors

International Rice Research Institute; International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

International Rice Research Institute (IRRI); International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 2024. TAFSSA District Agrifood Systems Assessment in India 2023: Local Market and Retail Census. Washington, DC: IFPRI [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DEOUER. Harvard Dataverse. Version 1.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Agrifood Systems; Diet; Food Security; Gender Equality; Natural Resources; Climate Change; Waste Disposal; Market Access; Infrastructure; Impact Assessment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/deouer Source record

Project

Transforming Agrifood Systems in South Asia

Record type

Dataset

Dataset

Women’s Voice and Agency in the MGNREGA in Odisha: Baseline Data

2024International Food Policy Research Institute
Details

Women’s Voice and Agency in the MGNREGA in Odisha: Baseline Data

This dataset contains baseline information for the project “Women’s Voice and Agency in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) in Odisha,” conducted in April-May 2023 across five districts in the eastern coastal state of Odisha, India. The study aimed to evaluate interventions designed to enhance women’s voice and agency in selecting assets to be created under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), a national workfare program. The baseline data focused on female respondents actively participating in MGNREGA, capturing their demographic and socioeconomic profiles, experiences, and knowledge of the program, as well as their perspectives on agency and voice. Additional interviews were conducted with Gram Rozgar Sewaks, the primary program functionaries, and community representatives familiar with village-level facilities. The sample included 50 Gram Panchayats (villages) from each of the five districts, targeting 15 female respondents per Gram Panchayat, for a total of 3,750 intended respondents. However, due to community refusals in one district, interviews could not be conducted in 30 of the 50 Gram Panchayats, resulting in a final sample size of approximately 3,426 female respondents, 220 Gram Rozgar Sewaks, and 229 community-level interviews.

Year published

2024

Authors

International Food Policy Research Institute

Citation

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 2024. Women’s Voice and Agency in the MGNREGA in Odisha: Baseline Data. Washington, DC: IFPRI [dataset]. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TF0SDZ. Harvard Dataverse. Version 1.

Country/Region

India

Keywords

Asia; Southern Asia; Decision Making; Employment; Assets; Surveys; Women; Women’s Empowerment; Baseline Data; Impact Assessment

Language

English

Access/Licence

Open AccessCC-BY-4.0

Links

https://doi.org/10.7910/dvn/tf0sdz Source record

Project

Gender Equality

Record type

Dataset

Blogs

World Breastfeeding Week: Research shows the vital importance of support for mothers and infants
IFPRI Blog
 | 
August 01, 2025

World Breastfeeding Week: Research shows the vital importance of support for mothers and infants

By Jennifer Johnson

Insights from IFPRI research.

Understanding and supporting collective action in natural resource management through experiential learning games: Examples from three continents
IFPRI Blog
 | 
July 23, 2025

Understanding and supporting collective action in natural resource management through experiential learning games: Examples from three continents

By Hagar ElDidi, Thomas Falk, Juan Felipe Ortiz-Riomalo, Franziska Auch, Wei Zhang, and Upeksha Hettiarachchi

Fostering cooperative stewardship.

Pathways to power in fragile settings: Rethinking women’s roles in agriculture and food systems
IFPRI Blog
 | 
April 25, 2025

Pathways to power in fragile settings: Rethinking women’s roles in agriculture and food systems

By Agnes Quisumbing, Jordan Kyle, Katrina Kosec, and Catherine Ragasa

Difficult circumstances also offer opportunities.

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Events

Food Policy for a Changing World: Lessons and Priorities for South Asia
Series/Special Event

 | 

September 16, 2025, 2:30 – 6:15 pm

Food Policy for a Changing World: Lessons and Priorities for South Asia

Agriculture plays a central role in South Asia, providing livelihoods for millions while shaping trade and food systems across the region. Countries like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka are major producers of rice, wheat, tea, and spices, with agricultural exports fueling economies and global supply chains. Despite these strengths, the sector faces significant challenges, […]

23rd International Congress of Nutrition (ICN)
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

August 24 to 29, 2025

23rd International Congress of Nutrition (ICN)

IFPRI is participating in the 23rd International Congress of Nutrition (ICN), hosted by the International Union of Nutritional Sciences (IUNS) on August 24-29 in Paris, France.  The theme of this year’s congress is “Sustainable Food for Global Health,” bringing together experts to discuss evidence and innovations in nutrition, sustainability, food science, and public health. IFPRI […]

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists
IFPRI at External Event

 | 

August 2 to 7, 2024

32nd International Conference of Agricultural Economists

The triennial International Conference of Agricultural Economists (ICAE-2024), centred on the theme “Transformation Towards Sustainable Agri-Food Systems” is scheduled from August 2-7, 2024, in New Delhi, India. The conference offers a distinctive platform, providing a golden opportunity for the agricultural academic institutions and researchers to convene in person, exchange knowledge, and actively contribute to the […]

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News

September 17, 2025 | Press Release

IFPRI and ICAR Convene South Asia Dialogue on Food Policy to Spotlight Priorities for Resilient, Healthy, and Inclusive Food Systems

The dialogue brought together senior policymakers, researchers, and development partners to reflect on how South Asia can secure resilient, inclusive, and sustainable food systems amid mounting pressures of climate change, malnutrition, and demographic transitions.

January 17, 2025 | In the News

A Shift to Less Water-Intensive Crops May be the Key to Protecting Farmer Lives (The Wire)

The Wire (India) interviewed Avinash Kishore, Senior Research Fellow based in IFPRI’s South Asia Office in New Delhi, for an article discussing the impact of government subsidies on water-intensive crop production in India, emphasizing the depletion of groundwater resources. Researchers commenting on the topic highlight how subsidies, particularly minimum support price (MSP) and guaranteed procurement, […]

December 20, 2024 | Press Release

Odisha Hosts Policy Roundtable on Inclusive Agricultural Transformation: Advancing Regional Collaboration and South-South Learning

Bhubaneswar, Odisha, 20 December 2024: The Government of Odisha, in collaboration with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the CGIAR Initiative on National Policies and Strategies (NPS), successfully hosted a Policy Roundtable in the State’s capital. Highlighting Odisha’s journey toward sustainable development, the roundtable provided a platform for regional collaboration, emphasizing opportunities for […]

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Projects

Groundwater governance: Managing the world’s most precious natural resource

Groundwater governance: Managing the world’s most precious natural resource

IFPRI’s research on natural resource governance addresses questions on how natural resources can best be managed, sustained, and restored, while improving livelihoods of the millions……

Women’s empowerment in agrifood governance (WEAGov)

Women’s empowerment in agrifood governance (WEAGov)

The Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) is an assessment tool developed by IFPRI and partners to help evaluate the extent to which women are……

Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia

Consortium for Scaling-up Climate Smart Agriculture in South Asia

…

View all Projects