News Overview

By Erick Boy, Inge Brouwer, Jen Foley, Natalia Palacios, Samuel Scott, and Victor Taleon November 4, 2024 Part of a series on key themes from IFPRI’s 2024 Global Food Policy Report. Read the other posts here, here, and here. Plant-source foods are a central component of sustainable healthy diets that promote individual health and well-being, are accessible, affordable, safe, and equitable, and culturally acceptable, while causing limited environmental stresses. The

October 31, 2024 On October 31, we observe World Cities Day.  As a growing global population increasingly concentrates in urban areas amid intensifying climate stresses, the impacts on food systems are significant. We asked three IFPRI researchers to address how urban food systems can face these challenges and become more sustainable and resilient.

By Jordan Kyle, Catherine Ragasa, Susan Kaaria, Margaret Mangheni, Dorine Odongo, and Anne Omamo July 12, 2024 Well-designed and well-implemented agrifood policies can play a significant role in closing gender gaps and setting countries on a pathway toward sustainable and equitable food systems. IFPRI’s new Women’s Empowerment in Agrifood Governance (WEAGov) assessment tool—developed with support from the CGIAR research initiative on Gender

By Deborah Rubin October 29, 2024 Programming to address gender disparities in agricultural production has grown significantly over the past quarter century since Kabeer (1999) defined women’s empowerment and called for greater support for women to gain agency over their lives. Important questions remain about the “how” of supporting women to engage with market systems and to use their earnings and

By Kibrom Abay, Clemens Breisinger, Harriet Mawia, Joyce Maru, Dorah Momanyi, and Boniface Munene October 28, 2024 Africa’s population is the youngest of any region, with more than 400 million young people aged 15 to 35 out of a total of 1.5 billion. But even though rising numbers of this cohort—a “youth bulge”—enter the labor market every year, African economies are still

By Suman Chakrabarti, Soyra Gune, Tim A. Bruckner, Julie Strominger, and Parvati Singh October 23, 2024 In 2014, the Indian government launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission (SBM) aimed at improving public sanitation. By 2020, the program had constructed 100 million toilets across the country. In SBM’s first five years, national rates of open defecation fell from 60% to 19% and toilet availability doubled.

By Emily Schmidt and Rishabh Mukerjee October 18, 2024 In Papua New Guinea (PNG), rural communities play a crucial role in shaping the country’s agricultural landscape and food security. To better understand these dynamics, IFPRI conducted a Rural Household Survey between May and December 2023 that aimed to gain a clearer picture of rural livelihood structures, food security status, and nutrition trends. We outlined some

By Juan Pablo Gianatiempo and Brian McNamara October 16, 2024 Mercosur (the Southern Common Market of South American countries) plays an important role in global food security as a major exporter of grains and other food products—and its members face a number of serious challenges. Climate change, market instability, and protectionist policies threaten to disrupt agricultural production and trade. At the same time, these