International Food Policy Research Institute

About: International Food Policy Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Food security & Agriculture. The organization has 1217 authors who have published 4952 publications receiving 218436 citations.

The quiet revolution in Asia's rice value chains.

Abstract: There is a rapid transformation afoot in the rice value chain in Asia. The upstream is changing quickly-farmers are undertaking capital-led intensification and participating in burgeoning markets for land rental, fertilizer and pesticides, irrigation water, and seed, and shifting from subsistence to small commercialized farms; in some areas landholdings are concentrating. Midstream, in wholesale and milling, there is a quiet revolution underway, with thousands of entrepreneurs investing in equipment, increasing scale, diversifying into higher quality, and the segments are undergoing consolidation and vertical coordination and integration. Mills, especially in China, are packaging and branding, and building agent networks in wholesale markets, and large mills are building direct relationships with supermarkets. The downstream retail segment is undergoing a "supermarket revolution," again with the lead in change in China. In most cases the government is not playing a direct role in the market, but enabling this transformation through infrastructural investment. The transformation appears to be improving food security for cities by reducing margins, offering lower consumer rice prices, and increasing quality and diversity of rice. This paper discusses findings derived from unique stacked surveys of all value chain segments in seven zones, more and less developed, around Bangladesh, China, India, and Vietnam.

Cropland for sub-Saharan Africa: A synergistic approach using five land cover data sets

Abstract: This paper presents a methodology for the creation of a cropland map for Africa through the combination of five existing land cover products: GLC-2000, MODIS Land Cover, GlobCover, MODIS Crop Likelihood and AfriCover. A synergy map is created in which the products are ranked by experts, which reflects the likelihood or probability that a given pixel is cropland. The cropland map is then calibrated with national and sub-national crop statistics using a novel approach. Preliminary validation of the map was undertaken and the results are presented. The resulting cropland map has an accuracy of 83%, which is higher than the accuracy of any of the individual maps. The cropland map is freely available at agriculture.geo-wiki.org.

Migration and young child nutrition: evidence from rural China.

Abstract: The unprecedented large-scale rural-to-urban migration in China has left many rural children living apart from their parents. In this study, we examine the impact of parental migration on the nutritional status of young children in rural areas. We use the interaction terms between wage growth, by gender, in provincial capital cities and initial village migrant networks as instrumental variables to account for migration selection. Our results show that parental migration has no significant effect on the height of children, but it improves their weight. We provide suggestive evidence that the improvement in weight may be achieved through increased access to tap water in migrant households.