Search results

Smallholder farmers in developing countries face several different constraints limiting their ability to reach their production potential. One such constraint is access to formal finance; smallholders and other agricultural value chain participants frequently cannot access credit necessary to invest in new crops or technologies, deal with risks and shocks, and or savings products to safely carry wealth from harvest to planting. New technologies, markets, and government priorities in several Southeast Asian countries combine to suggest new opportunities are emerging to overcome long-standing challenges to expanding agricultural finance: Those challenges include: (i) high transaction costs to financing in rural areas; (ii) managing risks unique to agriculture; and (iii) knowledge about how to deliver agriculture-based products. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; IFS4AG ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Efforts to promote the development and agricultural value chains area common element of strategies to stimulate economic growth in low-income countries. Since the world food price crisis in 2007-2008, developing country governments, international donor agencies, and development practitioners have placed additional focus on trying to make agricultural value chains work better for the poor. As value chains evolve to serve new markets, they tend to become less inclusive. For example, if a value chain for high quality rice arises within an economy, it is inherently easier for those who sell rice to retailers to source that high quality rice from larger farms with the ability to control quality than from dozens of smallholder farms. As a result, the normal path of value chain evolution can be biased against smallholders; hence it is important to understand what types of interventions can make value chains more inclusive while also making them more efficient. ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; CRP2 ; MTID; PIM ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)

Policymakers need to know what policies, investments, and actions they can take to ensure food systems transform in a healthy, sustainable, and equitable way. KEY FINDINGS - The rapid transformation of national food systems offers new opportunities for inclusion of poor and marginalized people, potentially improving dietary diversity, food safety, and quality. - As food systems transform across the spectrum from traditional to modern, government policy goals need to shift from a focus on food security to healthy, bal­anced diets. - National food system frameworks are useful tools for looking at the drivers and components of these systems, identifying data gaps, and finding promising entry points for actions to increase inclusion and improve nutri­tion outcomes. - Approaches to food system transformation must be country specific, as each country's food system is unique and countries face different opportunities and trade-offs for inclusiveness at different stages of transformation. ; PR ; IFPRI1; CRP4; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for all; 3 Building Inclusive and Efficient Markets, Trade Systems, and Food Industry; 5 Strengthening Institutions and Governance ; DGO; MTID; A4NH ; CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH)

Recent changes in the political landscape in the United Kingdom and the United States have put tighter borders and migration restrictions on the agenda. Concerns about unchecked migration have also risen in mainland Europe, as migration by boat to Italy from Libya grew rapidly after civil war broke out in the country in 2014. Meanwhile, protracted violence in Central America, the Middle East, and the Lake Chad basin has led to increasing flows of people out of their homes and farms into internally displaced persons (IDP) camps and refugee camps in neighboring countries. Governments in receiving countries have responded to the increasing voluntary and involuntary movement of people out of developing countries and conflict zones either by raising the rhetoric on border enforcement or reducing the number of voluntary migrants and of refugees they are willing to absorb. Yet overall flows of refugees, or forced migrants, may increase in the future. Models of climate change suggest that environmental displacement will increase pressure for migration from environmentally threatened areas of developing countries. And while accurately predicting migratory responses to either environmental degradation or climate change is difficult, recent work definitively links temperature changes to changing migration patterns across countries. ; PR ; IFPRI1; IFPRI4 ; DGO; MTID

Large-scale government cash transfer programs have become an important element of social protection and poverty reduction strategies throughout the developing world. Pakistan is no exception; in 2008, Pakistan established the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP) as an unconditional cash transfer targeted at the poorest of the poor. The primary goal of the BISP program is to provide the poorest households in Pakistan with unconditional transfers in order to improve their consumption and investments in children. To attain this goal, it is believed important that the transfers are provided directly to women to ensure the funds are spent as intended. Beyond changes in consumption and investment, directing these transfers to women can also serve to empower women by increasing household resources under their control. We analyze the impacts of Pakistan's BISP program on women's decision-making power within households using data collected between 2011 and 2013 as the program was rolling out. Using fuzzy regression discontinuity methods to statistically identify impacts, the BISP transfer is found to have substantial, positive impacts on some variables measuring women's decision-making power and empowerment.

IFPRI5; CRP2 ; MTID; PIM ; Non-PR ; CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)