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 way to a man's heart is through his stomach?: a mixed methods study on causal mechanisms through which cash and in-kind food transfers decreased intimate partner violence.

Abstract: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is highly prevalent and has detrimental effects on the physical and mental health of women across the world. Despite emerging evidence on the impacts of cash transfers on intimate partner violence, the pathways through which reductions in violence occur remain under-explored. A randomised controlled trial of a cash and in-kind food transfer programme on the northern border of Ecuador showed that transfers reduced physical or sexual violence by 30 %. This mixed methods study aimed to understand the pathways that led to this reduction. We conducted a mixed methods study that combined secondary analysis from a randomised controlled trial relating to the impact of a transfer programme on IPV with in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with male and female beneficiaries. A sequential analysis strategy was followed, whereby qualitative results guided the choice of variables for the quantitative analysis and qualitative insights were used to help interpret the quantitative findings. We found qualitative and quantitative evidence that the intervention led to reductions in IPV through three pathways operating at the couple, household and individual level: i) reduced day-to-day conflict and stress in the couple; ii) improved household well-being and happiness; and iii) increased women’s decision making, self-confidence and freedom of movement. We found little evidence that any type of IPV increased as a result of the transfers. While cash and in-kind transfers can be important programmatic tools for decreasing IPV, the positive effects observed in this study seem to depend on circumstances that may not exist in all settings or programmes, such as the inclusion of a training component. Moreover, the programme built upon rather than challenged traditional gender roles by targeting women as transfer beneficiaries and framing the intervention under the umbrella of food security and nutrition – domains traditionally ascribed to women. Transfers destined for food consumption combined with nutrition training reduced IPV among marginalised households in northern Ecuador. Evidence suggests that these reductions were realised by decreasing stress and conflict, improving household well-being, and enhancing women’s decision making, self-confidence and freedom of movement. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02526147 . Registered 24 August 2015.

The sequencing of agricultural market reforms in Malawi

Abstract: The paper analyses the welfare impacts of alternative sequencing scenarios of agricultural input and output market reforms in Malawi using a profit maximisation approach. After a review of the literature on the sequencing of agricultural market reforms, the agricultural sector in Malawi is described and its history of market reforms is summarised. Subsequently, a normalised quadratic profit function, with maize and groundnuts as the main competing outputs and fertiliser and labour as the major variable inputs, is estimated. The simulation results using the coefficients of the estimated normalised quadratic profit function show that, contrary to the sequencing path adopted in the 1980s, Malawi's government should have liberalised the maize sector first, followed by the groundnut export sector, and once a supply response was generated, input subsidies could have been phased out. This sequence would have minimised the adjustment costs of smallholder farmers and would have reduced the negative impact on maize productivity and food security. Copyright 1999 by Oxford University Press.

Solving Large Nonconvex Water Resources Management Models Using Generalized Benders Decomposition

Abstract: Nonconvex nonlinear programming (NLP) problems arise frequently in water resources management, e.g., reservoir operations, groundwater remediation, and integrated water quantity and quality management. Such problems are usually large and sparse. Existing software for global optimization cannot cope with problems of this size, while current local sparse NLP solvers, e.g., MINOS (Murtagh and Saunders 1987), or CONOPT (Drud 1994) cannot guarantee a global solution. In this paper, we apply the Generalized Benders Decomposition (GBD) algorithm to two large nonconvex water resources models involving reservoir operations and water allocation in a river basin, using an approximation to the GBD cuts proposed by Floudas et al. (1989) and Floudas (1995). To ensure feasibility of the GBD subproblem, we relax its constraints by introducing elastic slack variables, penalizing these slacks in the objective function. This approach leads to solutions with excellent objective values in run times much less than the GAMS NLP solvers MINOS5 and CONOPT2, if the complicating variables are carefully selected. Using these solutions as initial points for MINOS5 or CONOPT2 often leads to further improvements.