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 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
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 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
By Clara Ceravolo, Ilaria Sisto, Lauren Whitehead, Matthew Walsham, Morane Verhoeven, and Shalini Roy June 18, 2024 Air pollution, rising temperatures, crop failures, and water shortages are increasing pressures on health and agrifood systems. During these crises, households often reduce food consumption, sell assets, migrate or adjust labor allocation between men and women. Women and children are at greater risk
By Martina Mascarenhas, Anne G. Timu, and Liangzhi You November 7, 2024 Smallholder farmers across the globe produce over a third of the world’s food supply, yet they receive a disproportionately small share of global climate finance. A 2020 report released by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) shows that less than 2% of international climate
By Joseph Glauber and Abdullah Mamun November 8, 2024 Over the past two months, India has removed several of its restrictions affecting rice exports, some in place since September 2022. This is welcome news for rice importing countries, which for the past year have had to seek alternative suppliers at significantly elevated prices. This post—following up on previous assessments of the situation
By Hiroyuki Takeshima, Zin Wai Aung, Ian Masias, and Bart Minten November 12, 2024 History shows that as agricultural technologies have gradually improved, food production has grown. Yet adverse economic, political, or disaster-related shocks can disrupt this pattern. Since 2021, the political crisis in Myanmar has led to a deterioration in positive technological change, with particularly worrisome effects on smallholder farmers, a new