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Climate change could cause the production of irrigated and rainfed staple crops to drop by 25 percent compared to a no-climate change scenario in 2050 in the Asia Pacific region.IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Mark Rosegrant shared this and other findings at a conference in Sydney this week. Speaking to the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, Rosegrant assessed […]

US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vacated her post at the State Department last week. She may be gone, but her legacy will not be forgotten. The development community will remember her unwavering commitment to raising the profile of hunger and poverty in the developing world as well as in the United States. Food […]

Dr. Godfrey Bahiigwa has been appointed Office Head for IFPRI’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Over the last 15 years, he has worked with national and international research organizations and has been actively involved in food and agricultural policy both as a researcher and a practitioner. He has extensive experience dealing with the […]

Despite rapid economic growth in South Asia, its rates of child undernutrition remain the highest in the world, with nearly half of children stunted or underweight. Progress to reduce these rates is extremely slow. Ironically, most people in the region make their living from farming, which researchers say, offers great potential for improving nutrition. An ambitious […]

Historically, African countries rich in natural resources have hinged their economic prosperity on the export of global commodities, and, as such, their economies fluctuate with the rise and fall of global commodity prices. Just look back to the tumultuous boom-and-bust cycle seen during the oil and food crisis of the 1970s: short-lived prosperity followed by […]

Dr. Montague Yudelman, an influential leader in agricultural development, died on January 22, 2013.  Yudelman (known as “Monty” to his friends and colleagues) was, in the words of IFPRI Director General Shenggen Fan, “truly a giant in our profession.” Yudelman’s experience growing up on a family farm in South Africa sparked an active engagement in […]

One tends to think of farmers, especially low-income smallholder farmers, as the recipients of public investment for agriculture. At an IFPRI event earlier this week, a panel of experts turned that perspective around, pointing to research that showed farmers themselves as the largest, most important, investors in agriculture. The question remains, then, how can development […]

The sixth International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and IFPRI Impact Evaluation Seminar was held on January 31 at 12:30 EST. Paul Winters of American University spoke about how the Kenya Cash Transfer Programme for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (CT-OVC) has impacted individual and household decisions regarding labor, productive activities, and accumulation of productive assets. Winters discussed […]

IFPRI’s Mark Rosegrant and Siwa Msangi spoke at the conference, offering ideas on how to improve food security in the face of climate change, water stress, and other challenges. Rosegrant shared that more than one-third of the world’s population and almost 40 percent of grain production are at risk due to water stress. Using IFPRI’s IMPACT model to create future scenarios, Rosegrant said that […]

Governments looking to deploy social protection programs that combat hunger and poverty want a no-nonsense description of their options and a way to compare each program’s cost and impact. Policymakers and economists have long debated whether it is more effective and cost efficient to give poor and hungry people food or cash. To help answer […]

Policymakers, researchers, and other stakeholders are gathering today in Dhaka, Bangladesh  to discuss the country’s food security in at the workshop “The Feed the Future Zone and the Rest of Bangladesh: A Comparison of Food Security Aspects.” The workshop is organized by IFPRI and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The workshop […]

Dr. Betty Achan Ogwaro was interviewed during a visit to IFPRI in October 2012 “A hungry nation is an angry nation. A hungry house is an angry house…” Those words by Dr. Betty Achan Ogwaro, Minister of Agriculture, Forestry, and Rural Development of the newly formed Republic of South Sudan, set the tone for a […]

thiopians have a saying: “Little by little, the egg begins to walk.” This is certainly true of step-by-step progress towards gender equality on the African continent. Sometimes, however, that little egg gets a boost when seemingly unrelated policy reforms act together to reinforce and strengthen their impact on women’s empowerment.  A  study by IFPRI researchers Neha […]

When you think of popular food staples in Africa, wheat doesn’t necessarily come to mind first. Maize, green bananas, yams, cassava – sure. But wheat, the main ingredient for bread and pasta? In fact, the demand for wheat has been steadily rising in African countries, helped by a massive urban migration of people, who need […]

Should I buy packaged goods, or bulk? Generic or name brand? The questions long-faced by consumers at pharmacies and grocery stores are now being asked at farmers’ markets in the developing world as wholesalers and merchants try to profit with brand-name, glossy-packaged agricultural products. So the question IFPRI researchers are asking is: How does the branding […]

sia is home to more than two-thirds of the world’s poor and hungry. And as populations around the world continue to grow, the region’s most vulnerable people will be faced with even greater challenges in the coming decades. Climate change and unsustainable resource use are likely to impede agricultural productivity, exacerbating already high and volatile […]

The US government is “doubling down” on hunger and food security in the new presidential term, with a major focus on scaling up proven agricultural technologies to reach as many people as possible – and it would like the help of the international agricultural research community. That was a key message by USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah when he spoke at […]

The fifth International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) and IFPRI Impact Evaluation Seminar will be webcast live on December 13 at 12:30 EST. Andrew Zeitlin of the Georgetown Public Policy Institute will speak about lessons learned from a study of fertilizer use among cocoa farmers in Ghana. Zeitlin will discuss results from the paper Understanding Heterogeneity: Risk and Learning in the […]

The UN Doha climate change negotiations, ending tomorrow (Saturday), have been tough going. As the bottom drops out of the carbon market, negotiators are locked in dispute about renewing the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions (which expires in January), creating a new one, or–what’s looking possible–simply not taking any decisive action at all – […]

By now, most Americans have heard of the pending “fiscal cliff,” but have they heard of the “food cliff?” According to Josette Sheeran, Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF) and former Executive Director of the World Food Programme (WFP), falling off this precipice could have even more dire and far-reaching consequences than America’s financial […]