Showing papers by "International Food Policy Research Institute published in 2020"

COVID-19 risks to global food security.

Abstract: Economic fallout and food supply chain disruptions require attention from policy-makers As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, trade-offs have emerged between the need to contain the virus and to avoid disastrous economic and food security crises that hurt the world's poor and hungry most. Although no major food shortages have emerged as yet, agricultural and food markets are facing disruptions because of labor shortages created by restrictions on movements of people and shifts in food demand resulting from closures of restaurants and schools as well as from income losses. Export restrictions imposed by some countries have disrupted trade flows for staple foods such as wheat and rice. The pandemic is affecting all four pillars of food security (1): availability (is the supply of food adequate?), access (can people obtain the food they need?), utilization (do people have enough intake of nutrients?), and stability (can people access food at all times?). COVID-19 is most directly and severely impacting access to food, even though impacts are also felt through disruptions to availability; shifts in consumer demand toward cheaper, less nutritious foods; and food price instability. We outline the main threats COVID-19 poses to food security and suggest critical responses that policy-makers should consider to prevent this global health crisis from becoming a global food crisis.

South-to-North Water Diversion stabilizing Beijing’s groundwater levels

Abstract: Groundwater (GW) overexploitation is a critical issue in North China with large GW level declines resulting in urban water scarcity, unsustainable agricultural production, and adverse ecological impacts. One approach to addressing GW depletion was to transport water from the humid south. However, impacts of water diversion on GW remained largely unknown. Here, we show impacts of the central South-to-North Water Diversion on GW storage recovery in Beijing within the context of climate variability and other policies. Water diverted to Beijing reduces cumulative GW depletion by ~3.6 km3, accounting for 40% of total GW storage recovery during 2006–2018. Increased precipitation contributes similar volumes to GW storage recovery of ~2.7 km3 (30%) along with policies on reduced irrigation (~2.8 km3, 30%). This recovery is projected to continue in the coming decade. Engineering approaches, such as water diversions, will increasingly be required to move towards sustainable water management. The authors here address water sustainability in the greater area of Beijing, China. Specifically, the positive effects towards Beijing groundwater levels via water diversion from the Yangtze River to the North are shown.

Which practices co‐deliver food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and combat land degradation and desertification?

Abstract: There is a clear need for transformative change in the land management and food production sectors to address the global land challenges of climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation, combatting land degradation and desertification, and delivering food security (referred to hereafter as "land challenges"). We assess the potential for 40 practices to address these land challenges and find that: Nine options deliver medium to large benefits for all four land challenges. A further two options have no global estimates for adaptation, but have medium to large benefits for all other land challenges. Five options have large mitigation potential (>3 Gt CO2 eq/year) without adverse impacts on the other land challenges. Five options have moderate mitigation potential, with no adverse impacts on the other land challenges. Sixteen practices have large adaptation potential (>25 million people benefit), without adverse side effects on other land challenges. Most practices can be applied without competing for available land. However, seven options could result in competition for land. A large number of practices do not require dedicated land, including several land management options, all value chain options, and all risk management options. Four options could greatly increase competition for land if applied at a large scale, though the impact is scale and context specific, highlighting the need for safeguards to ensure that expansion of land for mitigation does not impact natural systems and food security. A number of practices, such as increased food productivity, dietary change and reduced food loss and waste, can reduce demand for land conversion, thereby potentially freeing-up land and creating opportunities for enhanced implementation of other practices, making them important components of portfolios of practices to address the combined land challenges.

A scoping review on incentives for adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and their outcomes

Abstract: The increasing pressure on agricultural production systems to achieve global food security and prevent environmental degradation necessitates a transition towards more sustainable practices. The purpose of this scoping review is to understand how the incentives offered to farmers motivate the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices and, ultimately, how and whether they result in measurable outcomes. To this end, this scoping review examines the evidence of nearly 18,000 papers on whether incentive-based programmes lead to the adoption of sustainable practices and their effect on environmental, economic and productivity outcomes. We find that independent of the incentive type, programmes linked to short-term economic benefit have a higher adoption rate than those aimed solely at providing an ecological service. In the long run, one of the strongest motivations for farmers to adopt sustainable practices is perceived benefits for either their farms, the environment or both. Beyond this, the importance of technical assistance and extension services in promoting sustainable practices emerges strongly from this scoping review. Finally, we find that policy instruments are more effective if their design considers the characteristics of the target population, and the associated trade-offs between economic, environmental and social outcomes. A more sustainable agriculture is needed to address global food security and environmental degradation. This scoping review surveys the incentives for farmers to adopt sustainable practices benefiting their farms, the environment or both.

Sea-level rise and human migration

Abstract: Anthropogenic sea-level rise (SLR) is predicted to impact, and, in many cases, displace, a large proportion of the population via inundation and heightened SLR-related hazards. With the global coastal population projected to surpass one billion people this century, SLR might be among the most costly and permanent future consequences of climate change. In this Review, we synthesize the rapidly expanding knowledge of human mobility and migration responses to SLR, providing a coherent roadmap for future SLR research and associated policy. While it is often assumed that direct inundation forces a migration, we discuss how mobility responses are instead driven by a diversity of socioeconomic and demographic factors, which, in some cases, do not result in a migration response. We link SLR hazards with potential mechanisms of migration and the associated governmental or institutional policies that operate as obstacles or facilitators for that migration. Specific examples from the USA, Bangladesh and atoll island nations are used to contextualize these concepts. However, further research is needed on the fundamental mechanisms underlying SLR migration, tipping points, thresholds and feedbacks, risk perception and migration to fully understand migration responses to SLR. Rising sea levels threaten to displace millions of people through direct inundation and increased exposure to related hazards. This Review highlights populations at risk from sea-level-rise-related migration and discusses individual and institutional factors that influence relocation decisions.

A cultivated planet in 2010 – Part 2: The global gridded agricultural-production maps

Abstract: Data on global agricultural production are usually available as statistics at administrative units, which does not give any diversity and spatial patterns; thus they are less informative for subsequent spatially explicit agricultural and environmental analyses. In the second part of the two-paper series, we introduce SPAM2010 – the latest global spatially explicit datasets on agricultural production circa 2010 – and elaborate on the improvement of the SPAM (Spatial Production Allocation Model) dataset family since 2000. SPAM2010 adds further methodological and data enhancements to the available crop downscaling modeling, which mainly include the update of base year, the extension of crop list, and the expansion of subnational administrative-unit coverage. Specifically, it not only applies the latest global synergy cropland layer (see Lu et al., submitted to the current journal) and other relevant data but also expands the estimates of crop area, yield, and production from 20 to 42 major crops under four farming systems across a global 5 arcmin grid. All the SPAM maps are freely available at the MapSPAM website (http://mapspam.info/, last access: 11 December 2020), which not only acts as a tool for validating and improving the performance of the SPAM maps by collecting feedback from users but is also a platform providing archived global agricultural-production maps for better targeting the Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, SPAM2010 can be downloaded via an open-data repository (DOI: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/PRFF8V; IFPRI, 2019).

Modelling the global economic consequences of a major African swine fever outbreak in China.

Abstract: African swine fever is a deadly porcine disease that has spread into East Asia where it is having a detrimental effect on pork production. However, the implications of African swine fever on the global pork market are poorly explored. Two linked global economic models are used to explore the consequences of different scales of the epidemic on pork prices and on the prices of other food types and animal feeds. The models project global pork prices increasing by 17-85% and unmet demand driving price increases of other meats. This price rise reduces the quantity of pork demanded but also spurs production in other parts of the world, and imports make up half the Chinese losses. Demand for, and prices of, food types such as beef and poultry rise, while prices for maize and soybean used in feed decline. There is a slight decline in average per capita calorie availability in China, indicating the importance of assuring the dietary needs of low-income populations. Outside China, projections for calorie availability are mixed, reflecting the direct and indirect effects of the African swine fever epidemic on food and feed markets.

A comparison of the Indian diet with the EAT-Lancet reference diet

Abstract: The 2019 EAT-Lancet Commission report recommends healthy diets that can feed 10 billion people by 2050 from environmentally sustainable food systems. This study compares food consumption patterns in India, from different income groups, regions and sectors (rural/urban), with the EAT-Lancet reference diet and highlights the deviations. The analysis was done using data from the Consumption Expenditure Survey (CES) of a nationally representative sample of 0.102 million households from 7469 villages and 5268 urban blocks of India conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) in 2011–12. This is the most recent nationally representative data on household consumption in India. Calorie consumption (kcal/capita/day) of each food group was calculated using the quantity of consumption from the data and nutritional values of food items provided by NSSO. Diets for rural and urban, poor and rich households across different regions were compared with EAT-Lancet reference diet. The average daily calorie consumption in India is below the recommended 2503 kcal/capita/day across all groups compared, except for the richest 5% of the population. Calorie share of whole grains is significantly higher than the EAT-Lancet recommendations while those of fruits, vegetables, legumes, meat, fish and eggs are significantly lower. The share of calories from protein sources is only 6–8% in India compared to 29% in the reference diet. The imbalance is highest for the households in the lowest decile of consumption expenditure, but even the richest households in India do not consume adequate amounts of fruits, vegetables and non-cereal proteins in their diets. An average Indian household consumes more calories from processed foods than fruits. Indian diets, across states and income groups, are unhealthy. Indians also consume excess amounts of cereals and not enough proteins, fruits, and vegetables. Importantly, unlike many countries, excess consumption of animal protein is not a problem in India. Indian policymakers need to accelerate food-system-wide efforts to make healthier and sustainable diets more affordable, accessible and acceptable.

COVID-19 and Global Food Security

Abstract: Covid-19 has major implications for global food security. The virus itself and the policy reactions have triggered a massive recession and major disruptions in food value chains. The combination of both has been dramatic for the food and nutrition security of billions of poor people around the world. The impacts are heterogeneous, depending on the nature of the commodity, the resource-intensity of the food systems, and the level of economic development. Covid-19 affects the food security and nutrition of poor people more strongly than that of richer people. Women, children and migrants are particularly affected. It is important to balance movement control and other social distancing measures with policy initiatives to improve the food and nutrition security and livelihoods of vulnerable groups. A crucial issue moving forward is to make food supply chains, and food systems generally, more resilient for the future. While many food systems have been significantly disrupted, others have been more resilient, with food supplies relatively unaffected. Innovations are helping to overcome obstacles and make food supply chains more resilient for the future. Overall, the insights and lessons from Covid-19 should help to design better policies and build more resilient and inclusive food systems for the future.

Multiplying the efficiency and impact of biofortification through metabolic engineering

Abstract: Ending all forms of hunger by 2030, as set forward in the UN-Sustainable Development Goal 2 (UN-SDG2), is a daunting but essential task, given the limited timeline ahead and the negative global health and socio-economic impact of hunger. Malnutrition or hidden hunger due to micronutrient deficiencies affects about one third of the world population and severely jeopardizes economic development. Staple crop biofortification through gene stacking, using a rational combination of conventional breeding and metabolic engineering strategies, should enable a leap forward within the coming decade. A number of specific actions and policy interventions are proposed to reach this goal.

Estimating and understanding crop yields with explainable deep learning in the Indian Wheat Belt

Abstract: Forecasting crop yields is becoming increasingly important under the current context inwhich food security needs to be ensured despite the challenges brought by climate change, an expandingworld population accompanied by rising incomes, increasing soil erosion, and decreasingwater resources. Temperature, radiation, water availability and other environmental conditions influence crop growth, development, andfinal grain yield in a complex nonlinearmanner.Machine learning (ML) techniques, and deep learning (DL)methods in particular, can account for such nonlinear relations between yield and its covariates. However, they typically lack transparency and interpretability, since theway the predictions are derived is not directly evident. Yet, in the context of yield forecasting, understandingwhich are the underlying factors behind both a predicted loss or gain is of great relevance. Here, we explore how to benefit from the increased predictive performance ofDLmethods whilemaintaining the ability to interpret how themodels achieve their results. To do so, we applied a deep neural network tomultivariate time series of vegetation andmeteorological data to estimate the wheat yield in the IndianWheat Belt. Then, we visualized and analyzed the features and yield drivers learned by themodel with the use of regression activationmaps. TheDLmodel outperformed other testedmodels (ridge regression and random forest) and facilitated the interpretation of variables and processes that lead to yield variability. The learned features weremostly related to the length of the growing season, and temperature and light conditions during this time. For example, our results showed that high yields in 2012were associatedwith low temperatures accompanied by sunny conditions during the growing period. The proposedmethodology can be used for other crops and regions in order to facilitate application ofDLmodels in agriculture.

How Indian agriculture should change after COVID-19

Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerability of India’s Agri food system and accentuated the need for agricultural market reforms and digital solutions to connect farmers to markets, to create safety nets and ensure reasonable working conditions, and to decentralize Agri food systems to make them more resilient.

Learning in times of lockdown: how Covid-19 is affecting education and food security in India

Abstract: A vast majority of the relief and rehabilitation packages announced in the months following the nationwide lockdown in India have focused on economic rehabilitation. However, the education sector has remained absent from this effort, including in India's central government's 250 billion dollar stimulus package. In this paper, we discuss the implications of lockdown-induced school and rural child-care center closures on education and health outcomes for the urban and rural poor. We especially focus on food and nutritional security of children who depend on school feeding and supplementary nutrition programs. We argue that the impacts are likely to be much more severe for girls as well as for children from already disadvantaged ethnic and caste groups. We also discuss ways in which existing social security programs can be leveraged and strengthened to ameliorate these impacts.

A balance act: minimizing economic loss while controlling novel coronavirus pneumonia

Abstract: The outbreak of Novel Coronavirus Pneumonia (NCP) has significantly affected China and beyond. How to effectively control such epidemic has gradually become a global issue. This paper reviews the e...

The impact of interventions in the global land and agri-food sectors on Nature's Contributions to People and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

Abstract: Interlocked challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation require transformative interventions in the land management and food production sectors to reduce carbon emissions, strengthen adaptive capacity, and increase food security. However, deciding which interventions to pursue and understanding their relative co-benefits with and trade-offs against different social and environmental goals have been difficult without comparisons across a range of possible actions. This study examined 40 different options, implemented through land management, value chains, or risk management, for their relative impacts across 18 Nature's Contributions to People (NCPs) and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We find that a relatively small number of interventions show positive synergies with both SDGs and NCPs with no significant adverse trade-offs; these include improved cropland management, improved grazing land management, improved livestock management, agroforestry, integrated water management, increased soil organic carbon content, reduced soil erosion, salinization, and compaction, fire management, reduced landslides and hazards, reduced pollution, reduced post-harvest losses, improved energy use in food systems, and disaster risk management. Several interventions show potentially significant negative impacts on both SDGs and NCPs; these include bioenergy and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, afforestation, and some risk sharing measures, like commercial crop insurance. Our results demonstrate that a better understanding of co-benefits and trade-offs of different policy approaches can help decision-makers choose the more effective, or at the very minimum, more benign interventions for implementation.

The economic costs of COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa: insights from a simulation exercise for Ghana

Abstract: Globally, countries have resorted to social distancing, travel restrictions and economic lockdowns to reduce transmission of COVID-19. The socioeconomic costs of these blunt measures are expected to be high, especially in sub-Saharan Africa where many live hand-to-mouth and lack social safety nets. Social Accounting Matrix multiplier model results show that Ghana's urban lockdown, although in force for only three weeks in April 2020, has likely caused GDP to fall by 27.9% during that period, while an additional 3.8 million Ghanaians temporarily became poor. Compared to the government's revised GDP growth rate of 1.5% for 2020, the model predicts a contraction of 0.6 to 6.3% for 2020, depending on the speed of the recovery. The US$200 million budgeted for Ghana's Coronavirus Alleviation Program will close only a small part of the estimated US$ 2.3 billion GDP gap between the fast recovery scenario and government's revised GDP trajectory.