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The context in which international food trade takes place has changed considerably since the last Ministerial Conference (MC11) in 2017. Significant progress has not been achieved in many import-ant issues that are still pending on the organization's agenda. Moreover, geopolitical changes and the Covid-19 pandemic have drastically impacted the institutional priorities of countries and the WTO it-self. The global economy has substantially deteriorated over the past two years, with structural impacts in the areas of trade and food security, particularly for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The multilateral trading system and its main organization, the WTO, have come under attack and are being discredited. The possibility of advancing towards coordinated solutions to major global issues through multilateral cooperation seems unlikely.Countries have adopted a wide range of strategic decisions to respond to the effects of this situation on international trade and agriculture. Many have revised their trade policies to adjust them to different scenarios with respect to food security and agricultural trade flows. The surge in commodity prices and a fear of food shortages have led some governments to apply restrictive measures that limit or tax agricultural exports. Other measures adopted include direct market interventions through public stock holdings, special safeguard mechanisms, and state trading enterprises. The adoption of these measures has triggered new debates on their effectiveness in reducing food insecurity and propelling the development of fair and transparent food markets.Regulations such as sustainability standards, access restrictions or domestic support measures must be transparent and aligned with WTO principles to avoid discretionary applications and discrimina-tory practices. Information transparency is key to access and develop new markets, especially under growing environmental scrutiny. Effective market access is crucial, not only for the development of agro-exporting countries (which prioritize this issue on their development agendas) but also for importing countries, as a means of guaranteeing food security and connecting main suppliers with buyers in regions facing food shortages.The WTO dispute settlement mechanism has become a strategic asset for developing countries, enabling them to continue expanding their agricultural exports and strengthening their position in the market. However, the current state of paralysis of the WTO Appellate Body has recently affected the institution's effectiveness in regulating and arbitrating conflicts in the area of food trade relations. Most importantly, the growth strategy of Latin American countries depends on the WTO and the legal order that it enforces; therefore, actively contributing to its modernization and prioritizing its success as part of their trade and foreign policies is of crucial importance. ; Executive Summary Introduction Measures taken in the context of the Covid-19 and discussed at the WTO Committee on Agriculture Topics discussed at the WTO agricultural committee going into the MC12 New disciplines for domestic support Restrictions and export duties: a pending issue Market access Public Stockholdings, Special Safeguard Mechanism and State Trading Enterprises: What's food security got to do with them? Other topics relevant for Agriculture and the WTO Promoting Transparency on Agricultural Policies at the WTO: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean Impacts of agricultural producer support on climate and nutrition outcomes with special emphasis on Latin America and the Caribbean Harmonization of sustainability standards under the WTO framework as the core to create an intersection of trade and environment mutually supportive Plurilateral agreements under the WTO Food Products, the WTO Dispute Settlement System and Trade Remedies WTO Dispute Settlement Cases Involving Latin American countries and the Agreement on Agriculture, 1995-2019 MIRAGRODEP, an analytical model adapted to economic and trade reforms Some thoughts and proposals for a way forward ; Non-PR ; IFPRI2; CRP2; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; LAC; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

In December 2017 the WTO Ministerial Conference was held in Buenos Aires, Argentina. They were difficult times both in terms of economic and political uncertainties. The global economy was faltering and there was growing dissatisfaction with globalization and the global trading regulatory system had already surfaced and affected the spirit and environment in which negotiations in the multilateral trading system took place. Consequently, it also affected the deliberations in the Conference and the possibilities to attain progress in the themes that where under consideration like, such as a plurilateral agreement on fisheries and an agreement on public food stockholdings. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP2; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Measures to slow down the spread of Covid-19 have had profound effects on the food and nutrition security of poor and marginalised households and communities. This article provides an overview of the effects of Covid-19 on food systems across low- and middle-income countries using resilience and political economy lenses, before proposing approaches to build back resilient and equitable food systems. First, future interventions need to target structural issues that limit people's agency in accessing nutritious and diverse food and production capital. Second, local innovation systems and institutions require investment to create a market environment that benefits domestic (small and medium) enterprises and agri‑food supply chain workers without jeopardising the environment. Third, interventions need to be informed by a diverse set of opinions that include the voices of the most marginalised. ; IFPRI3; CRP4; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all ; PHND; A4NH ; PR ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; DCA; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; SAR; A4NH

The COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly disrupted the global delivery of preventive health care services, as a large number of governments have issued state of emergency orders halting service delivery. However, there is limited evidence on the realized effects of the pandemic and associated emergency orders on access to services in low-income country contexts to date. To address this gap, this paper analyzes administrative data on utilization of contraceptive health services by women referred via community health promoters in two large urban and peri-urban areas of Mozambique. We focus on the period immediately surrounding the national state of emergency declaration linked to the COVID-19 pandemic on March 31, 2020. Data reported for 109,129 women served by 132 unique promoters and 192 unique public health facilities is analyzed using logistic regression, interrupted time series analysis and hazard analysis. The results demonstrate that the imposition of the state of emergency is associated with a modest short-term drop in both service provision and utilization, followed by a relatively rapid rebound. We conclude that in this context, the accessibility of reproductive health services was not dramatically reduced during the first phase of the pandemic-related emergency. ; IFPRI3; ISI; DCA; G Cross-cutting gender theme ; PHND ; PR

The book has been prepared by authors from different international organizations – including FAO, IFPRI, UNCTAD and ECLAC, as well as legislators and academics from prestigious Latin American universities – seeking to foster reflections for the Global Food Systems Summit, to be held in September 2021. It contextualizes the region's food systems within a post COVID-19 pandemic scenario and raises new challenges (and opportunities) for policy makers, decision makers, the private sector, and the general public. Likewise, it offers important reflections on sustainability, from production to consumption, with the call to promote better governance of the global and regional food system. In order to face what some authors have deemed "the Syndemic of the century", the participation of companies, research centres, academia, NGOs, government agencies and international organizations will be necessary. ; PR ; IFPRI5; DCA; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance; G Cross-cutting gender theme ; LAC

The recent history of rural economic transformation in Myanmar and the effects of COVID-19 and the military coup in February 2021 provide important lessons for the design and implementation of plans to help the country recover from these scourges. The impoverishment of farming communities in Myanmar during decades of socialist military rule, beginning in the 1960s until the turn of the century, led to an outflux of migrants to neighboring countries. As the country opened up to foreign investment through economic reforms initiated in 2011, rural wages surged and farm mechanization services expanded rapidly. Together with increased remittance flows from migrants, higher rural household incomes drove growth in a wide range of non-farm service enterprises. Nevertheless, agricultural growth was low and most crop subsectors stagnated due to underlying and unresolved structural constraints such as poor infrastructure and inequality in land access. As in many other countries in Asia, border closures and lockdowns instituted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 resulted in widespread employment and income losses. The Myanmar government pro-actively sought to mitigate the impacts through expanded credit to farmers and businesses. By the end of 2020, Myanmar was beginning to recover from the economic stresses of COVID-19. However, the February 2021 military coup resulted in a far more severe economic downturn than COVID-19 due to the collapse of the financial system, the massive resignations by public sector employees, and the prolonged movement restrictions. Coup-induced state failure greatly magnified the health and economic consequences of COVID-19 in terms of poverty, food insecurity, and stalled economic transformation. This paper uses a combination of macro, meso, and micro-level analyses to measure the impacts of COVID-19 and state failure on rural economic transformation through the lens of the agri-food system, and to draw lessons for policies to support broad-based and resilient economic recovery. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; MyanmarSSP; MAPSA; CRP2; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

In April 2020, Tanzania's prime minister made a simple plea: "Tanzanians should maintain trust in the government. You should continue to trust our experts who are behind every decision we make." A month later, the country's then president, John Magufuli, fired the head of its national COVID-19 test laboratory and committed to importing an untested herbal tonic from Madagascar that was controversially touted as a cure for the novel coronavirus despite scientists' worries that it could lead to drug-resistant malaria. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP4; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; DSGD; DGO; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

India has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the context of a larger quasi-experimental impact assessment, we assess the pandemic's effects on coping behavior in 80 villages spread across four districts and three states (n=772). Half of these villages were targeted by a largescale common land restoration program spearheaded by an NGO, the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). The other half are yet to be targeted but are statistically similar vis-à-vis FES's village targeting criteria. Analyzing the results of a phone survey conducting eight to ten months into the pandemic and its associated lockdowns, we find that the livelihood activities of households in both sets of villages were adversely impacted by COVID-19. Consequently, most households had to resort to various coping strategies, e.g., distressed asset sales and reduced farm input expenditure. From the same mobile survey data, we further construct a Livelihoods Coping Strategies Index (LCSI) and find that households in villages targeted by FES's common land restoration initiative score 11.3% lower on this index on average. While modest, this statistically significant effect estimate (p<0.05) is consistent across the four districts and robust to alterative model and outcome specifications. We find no empirical support that our observed effect was due to improved access to common pool resources or government social programs. Instead, we speculate that this effect may be driven by institutional factors, rather than economic, a proposition we will test in future work. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; DCA; CRP2; CRP5; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; EPTD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM); CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE)

In early 2020, African governments adopted a wide range of containment and confinement measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 in the continent. The measures included border closures, suspension of international flights, closures of markets and schools, state-of-emergency declarations, total and partial lockdowns, restrictions on internal movement, imposition of curfews, and closures of nonessential businesses (UN-Habitat 2020; IMF 2020). To mitigate the adverse economic effects of these health measures, governments implemented various emergency economic supports and regulations. Several institutions have tracked the type and size of policy responses by African countries to ease the adverse impacts on agricultural development, food security, finance, and trade (Laborde and Parent 2020; Bisson and Hambleton 2020). These studies have explored the incidence and impacts of emergency responses with the objective of estimating the costs of COVID-19. Similarly, AKADEMIYA2063 has established analytical workstreams to monitor the impacts of COVID-19 on food production, markets, trade, and households (Badiane and Collins 2020). However, these studies have evaluated the overall impact of COVID-19 without disentangling the impacts of the health measures from those of the economic measures. ; PR ; IFPRI4; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; Feed the Future Initiative; ReSAKSS ; AFR

After 50 years of success, multilateral trade liberalization, conducted under the umbrella of the World Trade Organization (WTO), is in a deadlock, as illustrated by the impasse in which the Doha Round is for almost 20 years. Many explanations have been advanced. Let us quote three of them. First, there are many trading partners involved in the negotiation and their interests are too heterogeneous, such that there is no outcome benefiting all parties (Bouët and Laborde, 2010). Second the welfare gains expected from a new round of multilateral trade liberalization are small compared to the internal redistributive effects that it may imply (Rodrik, 1994). Third, there is asymmetric information not only between policymakers and the producers they want to protect from income variation, but also between trade negotiators at WTO about the political influence of domestic producers in each country. This double informational asymmetry gives birth to informational rents and makes difficult the implementation of free trade (Bouët, Laborde and Martimort, 2020). ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP2; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

The international community is facing considerable challenges today. To meet these challenges, governments, regional bodies, and international institutions must define and implement reforms that meet a triple requirement: inclusiveness, sustainability and resilience. Inclusiveness means the implementation of reforms that primarily benefit the most disadvantaged populations in terms of income, food security, and/or health status. Sustainability means the design of solutions that favor the fight against climate change and the respect of biodiversity. Resilience means finding out tools that enable economies and populations to resist external shocks (extreme climatic events, pandemics). ; Non-PR ; IFPRI4; CRP2; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and associated lockdown measures have disrupted educational and nutrition services globally. Understanding the overall and differential impacts of disruption of nutritional (school feeding) services is critical for designing effective post-COVID-19 recovery policies. Objectives: The aim of this study was to examine the impact of COVID-19-induced disruption of school feeding services on household food security in Nigeria. Methods: We combined household-level, pre-COVID-19 in-person survey data with postpandemic phone survey data, along with local government area (LGA)–level information on access to school feeding services. We used a difference-in-difference approach and examined temporal trends in the food security of households with and without access to school feeding services. Of the sampled households, 83% live in LGAs with school feeding services. Results: Households experienced an increase in food insecurity in the post-COVID-19 survey round. The share of households skipping a meal increased by 47 percentage points (95% CI: 44–50 percentage points). COVID-19-induced disruptions of school feeding services increased households' experiences of food insecurity, increasing the probability of skipping a meal by 9 percentage points (95% CI: 3–17 percentage points) and the likelihood of going without eating for a whole day by 3 percentage points (95% CI: 2–11 percentage points). Disruption of school feeding services is associated with a 0.2 SD (95% CI: 0.04–0.41 SD) increase in the food insecurity index. Households residing in states experiencing strict lockdown measures reported further deterioration in food insecurity. Single mothers and poorer households experienced relatively larger deteriorations in food security due to disruption of school feeding services. Conclusions: Our findings show that COVID-19-induced disruptions in educational and nutritional services have exacerbated households' food insecurity in Nigeria. These findings can inform the designs of immediate and medium-term policy responses, including the designs of social protection policies and alternative programs to substitute nutritional services affected by the pandemic. ; PR ; IFPRI3; ISI; CRP2; NSSP; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 4 Transforming Agricultural and Rural Economies; IFPRIOA ; DSGD; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)