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

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.

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.