The first of three books in IFPRI’s climate change in Africa series, West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 11 of the countries that make up West Africa — Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo — and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. West Africa’s population is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. West Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer. Through the use of hundreds of scenario maps, models, figures, and detailed analysis, the editors and contributors of West African Agriculture and Climate Change present plausible future scenarios that combine economic and biophysical characteristics to explore the possible consequences for agriculture, food security, and resources management to 2050. They also offer recommendations to national governments and regional economic agencies already dealing with the vulnerabilities of climate change and deviations in environment. Decisionmakers and researchers will find West African Agriculture and Climate Change a vital tool for shaping policy and studying the various and likely consequences of climate change.

West African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis

Science & Math

Agricultural Sciences

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

The volume consists of an overview and seven country studies, written by leading scholars from both developed and developing countries. The overview lays out a unifying framework for thinking about economic growth as a combination of two challenges. The “structural change challenge” is focused on moving resources from traditional low-productivity activities into modern, more productive industries. The “fundamentals challenge” faced by policy makers in the developing world is about how best to develop broad capabilities such as human capital and infrastructure. While the two are inextricably linked, they are conceptually different, and making this distinction is one of the contributions of this book. The overview also includes a description of the common methodology used in the country studies, a discussion of data and measurement issues, and a synthesis of the findings.

Structural Change, Fundamentals, and Growth: A Framework and Case Studies

Business & Money

Economics

2018 Global Food Policy Report

Research Institute, International Food Policy

In recent years, the world has seen unprecedented attention and political commitment to addressing malnutrition. As nutrition rapidly rises on the global agenda, guidance is urgently needed on how to design, implement, and evaluate nutrition-enhancing policies and interventions. Nourishing Millions: Stories of Change in Nutrition brings together the most intriguing stories about improving nutrition from the past five decades. These stories provide insight into what works in nutrition, what does not, and the factors that contribute to success.

Nourishing Millions: Stories of Change in Nutrition

Have the lives of the world's poorest, neediest people improved over the past few decades? What policies have lifted some people out of the worst forms of poverty, and what conditions keep others mired within it? The Poorest and Hungry: Assessment, Analyses, and Actions answers such questions, bringing together studies of both what causes and what reduces severe poverty from a diverse group of development specialists. The book focuses on the poorest and hungry in society and identifies areas for action. Stable economic growth; targeted social programs and insurance that invest in and protect nutrition, health, and education; and political and social inclusion of previously marginalized groups emerge as the essential requirements for poverty reduction, and this book's contributors identify strategies for promoting all three. The Poorest and Hungry is an important resource for policymakers, development specialists, and others concerned with helping the world's poorest people.

The Poorest and Hungry: Assessment, Analyses, and Actions

Politics & Social Sciences

Von Braun, Joachim

Social Sciences

Learning from successes in agricultural development is now more urgent than ever. Progress in feeding the world's billions has slowed, while the challenge of meeting future food needs remains enormous and is subject to new uncertainties in the global food and agricultural systems. In the late 1950s around a billion people were estimated to go hungry every day. Scientists, policymakers, farmers, and ordinary people initiated a concerted push to boost agricultural production and productivity in developing countries. Great strides were also made in improving the quality of food and the ability of vulnerable people to access food needed for survival. All these efforts have done more than just feed millions. They have also demonstrated that agriculture can be a key driver of growth and development for many of the world's poorest countries.

Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development

Spielman, David J.

The fundamental purpose of agriculture is not just to produce food and raw materials, but also to grow healthy, well-nourished people. One of the sector’s most important tasks then is to provide food of sufficient quantity and quality to feed and nourish the world’s population sustainably so that all people can lead healthy, productive lives. Achieving this goal will require closer collaboration across the sectors of agriculture, nutrition, and health, which have long operated in separate spheres with little recognition of how their actions affect each other. It is time for agriculture, nutrition, and health to join forces in pursuit of the common goal of improving human well-being. In Reshaping Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, leading experts, practitioners, and policymakers explore the links among agriculture, nutrition, and health and identify ways to strengthen related policies and programs. The chapters in this book were originally commissioned as background papers or policy briefs for the conference “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health,” facilitated by the International Food Policy Research Institute’s 2020 Vision Initiative in New Delhi, India, in February 2011.

Reshaping Agriculture for Nutrition and Health

As conducting various types of experiments becomes a more popular component of economics research, understanding the experimental method becomes more important for policymakers and others concerned with economics issues. In Treating the Field as a Lab: A Basic Guide to Conducting Economics Experiments for Policymaking, Angelino Viceisza addresses this need by explaining some basic, non-exhaustive principles on how to conduct lab-like field experiments and describing the strengths and weaknesses of these types of experiment. Lab-like field experiments have primarily been conducted for four non-mutually exclusive purposes: 1. To test theories 2. To measure what have been considered “unobservable” characteristics 3. To disentangle heterogeneous effects of experiment treatments 4. To demonstrate economics concepts to those who are less familiar with them Unlike pure lab experiments, whose subjects are typically university students, lab-like field experiments involve people in the working world, such as farmers, traders, or firm managers, who take time from their daily lives to participate. Nevertheless, these experiments are conducted under more controlled conditions than a pure field experiment that might test people’s everyday behavior. Being less complicated than such field experiments, lab-like field experiments serve as good introductions to the experimental method while at the same time providing insights into more complex tests. Treating the Field as a Lab provides examples of lab-like field experiments, explains their basic rationale and methods, reviews the role of game theory in conducting these experiments, and discusses the challenges in deriving public policies from these experiments.

Treating the Field as a Lab: A Baisc Guide to Conducting Economics Experiments for Policymaking

Viceisza, Angelino C.G.

International

The work of agricultural researchers and development workers in Africa has the potential to significantly improve the lives of the poor. But that potential can only be realized with easy access to high-quality data and information. The Atlas of African Agriculture Research &amp; Development highlights the ubiquitous role of smallholder agriculture in Africa; the many factors shaping the location, nature, and performance of agricultural enterprises; and the strong interdependencies among farming, natural-resource stocks and flows, and the well-being of the poor. Organized around 7 themes, the atlas covers more than 30 topics, each providing mapped geospatial data and supporting text that answers four fundamental questions: What is this map telling us? Why is this important? What about the underlying data? Where can I learn more? The atlas is part of a wide-ranging eAtlas initiative that will showcase, through print and online resources, a variety of spatial data and tools generated and maintained by a community of research scientists, development analysts, and practitioners working in and for Africa. The initiative will serve as a guide, with references and links to online resources to introduce readers to a wealth of data that can inform efforts to improve the livelihoods of Africa’s rural poor. To learn more about the eAtlas initiative, visit http://agatlas.org.

Atlas of African Agriculture Research & Development: Revealing agriculture's place in Africa

The world’s population is expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Climate change, population, and income growth will drive food demand in the coming decades. Baseline scenarios show food prices for maize, rice, and wheat would significantly increase between 2005 and 2050, and the number of people at risk of hunger in the developing world would grow from 881 million in 2005 to more than a billion people by 2050. Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies examines which current and potential strategies offer solutions to fight hunger. The type and effectiveness of agricultural technologies are highly debated, and the debates are often polarized. Technology options are many, but transparent evidence-based information has been inconclusive or scarce. This book endeavors to respond to the challenge of growing food sustainably without degrading our natural resource base. The authors use a groundbreaking modeling approach that combines comprehensive process-based modeling of agricultural technologies with sophisticated global food demand, supply, and trade modeling. This approach assesses the yield and food impact through 2050 of a broad range of agricultural technologies under varying assumptions of climate change for the three key staple crops: maize, rice, and wheat. Geared toward policymakers in ministries of agriculture and national agricultural research institutes, as well as multilateral development banks and the private sector, Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity provides guidance on various technology strategies and which to pursue as competition grows for land, water, and energy across productive sectors and even increasingly across borders. The book is an important tool for targeting investment decisions today and going forward.

Food Security in a World of Natural Resource Scarcity: The Role of Agricultural Technologies

Rosegrant, Mark W.

Garrett, Karen

Ringler, Claudia

Robertson, Richard

Koo, Jawoo

Cenacchi, Nicola

Fisher, Myles

Cox, Cindy

Perez, Nicostrato D.

Sabbagh, Pascale

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