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

Food and nutrition security have become increasingly critical concerns for policy makers given that the slow progress on eliminating these challenges has reversed in recent years, with an increase in the number of hungry people by 122 million (20 percent) between 2019 and 2022. In addition to rebuilding in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global food system faces inter-related challenges from climate change, trade disruptions, increasing scarcity of water and land, environmental degradation, and evolving food demand patterns, among other factors. This paper assesses prospects to 2050 for food and nutrition security with a focus on low- and middle-income countries around the world in the context of these broader food system changes. Measures of food security presented here include per capita food and kilocalorie availability, the number and prevalence of hungry people, and micronutrient availability. Projected outcomes are assessed using the latest version of the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT) framework, a modeling system that combines information from climate models, crop simulation models, and river basin level hydrological and water supply and demand models linked to a global, partial equilibrium, multimarket agriculture sector model.

This study examines the impact of India's export restrictions on domestic retail rice prices using a dynamic panel GARCH model. The findings suggest that export restrictions are not a sufficient condition to lower domestic prices. Export restrictions are associated with lower retail price volatility in the East Zone. Moreover, the international price transmission to a sample of Asian and African economies shows that all countries are vulnerable, but the degree and kinds of vulnerability differ. Rice exporters appear to be the most susceptible as domestic prices increase in these countries. Rice importers are also vulnerable because of price increases, but the increases are less than in countries where the private sector decides on import quantities.

Climate change is a pressing issue requiring bold innovations using an integrated and systematic approach. As part of the CGIAR Webinar Series for the International Year of Plant health 2020 a webinar took place in 2021 entitled ‘Climate change and plant health: impact, implications, and the role of research for adaptation and mitigation’. The purpose of this paper is to share the discussions of the webinar and to show how CGIAR, working closely with partners, can contribute to better management of plant health in a climate crisis. The global research community has an enormous opportunity to collaborate on innovations, partnerships, capacity development and policy engagement to scale up solutions for plant health and agricultural resilience in a climate crisis, embedded within social and economic frameworks. Key action points were identified related to surveillance, big data and predictive models; integrated pest management (IPM) tools; a new paradigm for research to deliver end-to-end, sustainable solutions; fostering of an enabling environment; gender research; delivery of research at ecosystem and landscape scale through bundling and digital tools; and leveraging partnerships, including with the private sector. Through leveraging collaboration opportunities embedded within social and economic frameworks, the global research community has to scale up solutions for plant health and agricultural resilience under a changing climate.

Access to safe, affordable diets is paramount for improved nutritional outcomes. Yet, how do stakeholders perceive the binding constraints and requisite policy actions to increase food safety and affordability? Focusing on Nigeria, this paper uses best-worst scaling techniques applied to a survey of 200 government and agrifood system stakeholders to examine their policy beliefs on safety and affordability vis-à-vis the vegetable and fish value chains. We find that divergence among stakeholders is greater for food safety than affordability. While antibiotics overuse and toxin exposure, lack of knowledge, and weak legislation were identified by different stakeholders as the binding constraints for food safety, high costs of inputs and infrastructure, as well as security threats, were seen as common challenges for affordability across most, though not all, stakeholders for both value chains. Overall, the paper highlights the importance of beliefs in the agrifood system policymaking process and emphasizes the need to explore not only the existence but also the source of divergent beliefs among policy actors in greater depth.

Advances in technology and analytics to support data-driven agriculture has important implications for global food security and environmental sustainability. However, relatively few studies have investigated the potential to leverage the power of on-farm data for improved agronomy at scale using geospatial machine learning methods. Working in high-yielding rice systems of Uruguay, we developed a geospatial framework to identify yield-limiting factors across 55,000 ha annually of cropland over four seasons (2018–2021 harvest years), while also testing for tradeoffs in the environmental footprint related to nitrogen (N) fertilizer use. Our application of geographically-weighted random forest models showed that crop management decisions influenced rice yield more than variation in soil properties, highlighting the potential for improved agronomy to boost crop production by 1.4–1.8 Mg ha⁻¹ across regions. Seeding date, variety, P rate, and K rate were the most important variables controlling yield, but with significant variation across fields. When these factors were optimized by farmers, the risk of environmental N losses or soil N mining did not increase, highlighting the potential for sustainable intensification by improving N use efficiency. These findings present a pathway for harnessing the benefits of increasingly available on-farm data to identify yield-limiting factors while minimizing negative environmental externalities at the field-level. To enable the development of such geospatial frameworks in other regions, new partnerships are required to engage stakeholders and promote data sharing and collaboration among farmers, researchers, and industry, helping guide regional extension programs and orient future investments in agricultural research.

In recent decades, a growing transdisciplinary community has come together to leverage the power of cities in addressing pressing socio-ecological challenges, from climate change to food insecurity. Diverse theoretical and practical approaches to studying urban food governance have emerged in this context. However, they remain largely disconnected. Building on the contributions of this rapidly moving field, we propose a critical framework in the form of a guide that helps to understand, assess and shape urban food governance so that it can constitute a means of delivering just and sustainable outcomes. The framework proposes five interconnected principles to impact urban food governance thinking and practice: time, place, relationships, diversity and power. We argue that attending to these five principles can support the capacity and expansion of transformative urban food governance.