Global Food Security-Agriculture Policy Economics and Environment最新文献

The high proportion of people unable to afford nutrient-adequate diets has been recognised as a global challenge. For policies and programmes that aim to improve food security and nutrition, it is essential to know the magnitude of the gap between food expenditure and the lowest cost of meeting nutrient needs, i.e., the affordability gap. Using data and examples from Fill the Nutrient Gap analyses in Dominican Republic, Ethiopia and Indonesia, the paper shows how the affordability gap can be used to inform the design of social assistance programmes to have a bigger contribution towards making nutrient-adequate diets more affordable. The affordability gap indicator can help assess adequacy of the transfer value and inform the design of the benefits package to become more comprehensive through linkages with nutrition interventions.

Intensifying smallholder dairy farming can reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and increase food production on existing croplands. Much public policy therefore assumes that dairy intensification reduces emissions per unit of production, while simultaneously improving both rural incomes and food security. Whether the hypothesized social co-benefits of intensification manifest in practice has not however been fully empirically validated. Because intensification is labor and capital intensive, resource diversions may occur that could make rural livelihoods more specialized. This in turn could threaten dietary diversity and smallholder resilience to shocks. In this article, we accordingly examine the relationship between dairy intensification, livelihood diversity, nutrition diversity, and wellbeing, drawing on primary research conducted in two developing countries, Kenya and Tanzania, with vibrant smallholder dairy sectors. We find that dairy intensification by and large enhances livelihood diversity, nutritional diversity, and wealth. These findings suggest that for dairy, intensification and diversification may be complementary livelihood strategies.

This study examined how The World Food Programme’s Fill the Nutrient Gap (FNG) situation analysis has facilitated decision-making to support nutrition. Semi-structured interviews were held with 60 ‘broker’, ‘technical analyst’ and ‘consumer’ end users of the FNG in 11 countries. Almost all FNG cases, especially those conducted in 'development' contexts, had objectives of informing government decision-making, with some, especially in 'fragile' settings, also focused on informing WFP’s own programming. The FNG was credited with contributing evidence to national or sub-national nutrition strategy development, informing advocacy and building momentum and improving understanding around key nutrition issues. Internally, the FNG helped promote WFP’s nutrition-sensitive programming approaches. This article discusses these findings and explores how the FNG’s policy contribution could be strengthened in future applications.

This article relies on the findings of a report titled Cresciuti troppo in fretta (“Grown too fast”), published by ActionAid Italy (ActionAid 2022), which examined food poverty among adolescents in two areas of Italy. Guided by a conceptual framework that emerged from the results of a qualitative study conducted by interviewing 32 adults and their children (34 adolescents aged 11–16 years), belonging to families that benefit from food distribution services offered by charities in the cities of Milan and Siena, Italy, in 2022, the analysis focuses on the nutritional, social, and especially psychological and emotional consequences of food poverty on adolescents. Complementary data on reported food habits provide additional insights, especially on the more quantitative aspects of food consumption, and was used to better frame a comprehensive analysis of food poverty. The objective is to derive considerations useful for designing and implementing actions intended to specifically address the consequences of food poverty among youth. The fieldwork provided an invaluable opportunity to interact with adolescents experiencing food poverty, to better understand the subtle implications of food poverty for them. The rich set of data emerging from the interviews with the adolescents' and their parents reveals how important is the emotional sphere in their life and how it can be negatively impacted by food poverty, especially because it conditions the children's social life and relations, both with parents and their peers. One implication of this is that narrow interpretations of food security, mainly focusing on adequate food access and utilization, may not provide the correct perspective to look at the problem of food poverty for adolescents. As a further contribution, the study proposes a short questionnaire that focuses on these emotional and relational experiences by children, as related to food poverty. It aims at capturing the intensity of the emotional and psychological distress on adolescents caused by living in families that experience a condition of limited capacity to access food. When further developed and tested, the questionnaire could then serve as a contribution towards more comprehensive survey-based assessments of the consequences of food poverty among adolescents, in Italy and elsewhere. Overall, the study has increased our understanding of what experiencing food poverty means for the adolescents and their families in Italy and puts forward proposals that could be useful to guide more effective responses to the problem of adolescents' food poverty.

The forestry, livestock, fisheries and aquaculture sectors are critical for sustaining rural livelihoods and achieving food and nutrition security around the world. Yet, these sectors are marred by significant gender and social inequalities. This review examines gender gaps in these sectors and what has worked to reduce inequalities. We show that gender norms underpin the invisibility, undervaluation, and weight of women's labor; rural women's typically limited and precarious control over resources; gender-unequal influence over decision-making and agency; and gender-blind and discriminatory policies, data systems, and governance in these sectors. We evidence the diverse and multipronged strategies that have been used to lift these barriers, from the individual-to the system-level and spanning informal to formal institutions, to promote gender equality.

There is growing optimism about the potential of digital innovations to support climate action and transform agricultural markets. We review and characterize the landscape of digital innovations in the Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA) region. We highlight major success stories associated with the potential of digital innovations to facilitate rural market transformation and support climate action, including adaptation and mitigation. Our desk and landscape review identifies various digital innovations used in Egypt, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. We then create a typology of digital innovations based on seven broad service categorizations: weather and climate; agricultural finance; energy and early warning systems; data and crowdsourcing; market information and market place; extension and advisory information; and supply chain coordination. Three technical and validation workshops supplement this review. Our review shows that digital innovations have the potential to build resilience to climate change and increase market access, but their adoption remains low and varying across contexts. Significant heterogeneity and differences exist across these countries, possibly due to different institutional and regulatory frameworks that guide demand and capacity. We identify several supply and demand-side constraints facing the digital ecosystem in the region. There is the existence of a significant digital divide fueled by gender, literacy gaps, and related socioeconomic and psychosocial constraints. A seeming disconnect also exists between pilots and scale-ups, as most existing digital applications are unsuccessful in expanding beyond the pilot phase.

Organic farming has gained attention as a sustainable form of agriculture. However, concerns have been raised about its relatively low productivity. This paper reviews 23 modeling studies devoted to the large-scale implementation of organic farming that explicitly consider food supply and demand, with a particular focus on the capability of the simulated systems to provide sufficient food. Across all studies, the expansion of organic farming resulted in an important decrease in food production, which was more pronounced in studies simulating N cycle and its effects on organic crop yields (−44%). Nonetheless, this decrease could be compensated for by dietary changes and by a combination of other complementary measures. These results are nuanced by knowledge gaps and limitations of current models, particularly regarding the simulation of organic systems productivity and the consideration of outcomes beyond food provisioning. This review adds weight to the recent calls for a food system approach and contributes to future research on the implementation of agroecological systems and global food security modeling.

Resource criticality is the field of study that quantifies supply risks for a set of resources. To assess the vulnerability of a country's food supply, whether domestically produced or imported, supply risk indexes for agricultural products have been developed by adapting a resource criticality method and a supply diversity model. These indexes take into account both the diversity of supply and the risks to which each sourcing option is exposed, such as climate or price volatility.

The results enable a comparison of the supply risk of food consumption between different countries and identification of the products with the highest risk of supply disruption for each country. When analysed by region, the results indicate that North America and Europe generally have lower supply risk across all products than the rest of the world, while African and Sub-Saharan countries tend to have the highest supply risk. Furthermore, the analysis of supply risks for four cereals - wheat, maize, rice, and sorghum - indicates that trade diversification can reduce supply risks for wheat and maize in many countries. However, for rice and sorghum, supply risk reduction will most likely be achieved through stockpiling, export redirection, and adaptation of agriculture to climate change. The results highlight the importance of supply risk indexes for decision-making, particularly when compared to self-sufficiency. Finally, limitations and new perspectives are discussed, including the need to adapt the index to nutritional data, consider competition for agricultural product usage, and refine climate or economic risk indexes.

Cereal flour blending can reduce food insecurity risks, as well as contribute to economic and nutrition goals. Yet, the potential for blending has not been realized, and new products have not become scalable commercial propositions. Numerous experiments have shown the potential to produce acceptable foods derived from blended flours of diverse crops including wheat. An important question is whether the incentives, capacities and needs of farmers, processors and consumers have been considered. We argue that technical solutions must be developed within a specific agroecological, commercial, economic, and political environment. Innovations must address the clearly defined objectives of a wheat flour blending policy, if the potential benefits of blending for addressing food insecurity and economic stress are to be achieved.