International Food Policy Research Institute

Economic fallout and food supply chain disruptions require attention from policy-makers

Biofortification is a feasible and cost-effective means of delivering micronutrients to populations that may have limited access to diverse diets and other micronutrient interventions. Since 2003, HarvestPlus and its partners have demonstrated that this agriculture-based method of addressing micronutrient deficiency through plant breeding works. More than 20 million people in farm households in developing countries are now growing and consuming biofortified crops. This review summarizes key evidence and discusses delivery experiences, as well as farmer and consumer adoption. Given the strength of the evidence, attention should now shift to an action-oriented agenda for scaling biofortification to improve nutrition globally. To reach one billion people by 2030, there are three key challenges: 1) mainstreaming biofortified traits into public plant breeding programs; 2) building consumer demand; and 3) integrating biofortification into public and private policies, programs, and investments. While many building blocks are in place, institutional leadership is needed to continue to drive towards this ambitious goal.

Large gaps in labor productivity between the traditional and modern parts of the economy are a fundamental reality of developing societies. In this paper, we document these gaps, and emphasize that labor flows from low-productivity activities to high-productivity activities are a key driver of development. Our results show that since 1990 structural change has been growth reducing in both Africa and Latin America, with the most striking changes taking place in Latin America. The bulk of the difference between these countries' productivity performance and that of Asia is accounted for by differences in the pattern of structural change -with labor moving from low-to high-productivity sectors in Asia, but in the opposite direction in Latin America and Africa. In our empirical work, we identify three factors that help determine whether (and the extent to which) structural change contributes to overall productivity growth. In countries with a relatively large share of natural resources in exports, structural change has typically been growth reducing. Even though these "enclave" sectors usually operate at very high productivity, they cannot absorb the surplus labor from agriculture. By contrast, competitive or undervalued exchange rates and labor market flexibility have contributed to growth enhancing structural change.

Global efforts to reduce tropical deforestation rely heavily on the establishment of protected areas. Measuring the effectiveness of these areas is difficult because the amount of deforestation that would have occurred in the absence of legal protection cannot be directly observed. Conventional methods of evaluating the effectiveness of protected areas can be biased because protection is not randomly assigned and because protection can induce deforestation spillovers (displacement) to neighboring forests. We demonstrate that estimates of effectiveness can be substantially improved by controlling for biases along dimensions that are observable, measuring spatial spillovers, and testing the sensitivity of estimates to potential hidden biases. We apply matching methods to evaluate the impact on deforestation of Costa Rica's renowned protected-area system between 1960 and 1997. We find that protection reduced deforestation: approximately 10% of the protected forests would have been deforested had they not been protected. Conventional approaches to evaluating conservation impact, which fail to control for observable covariates correlated with both protection and deforestation, substantially overestimate avoided deforestation (by over 65%, based on our estimates). We also find that deforestation spillovers from protected to unprotected forests are negligible. Our conclusions are robust to potential hidden bias, as well as to changes in modeling assumptions. Our results show that, with appropriate empirical methods, conservation scientists and policy makers can better understand the relationships between human and natural systems and can use this to guide their attempts to protect critical ecosystem services.

Global food security will remain a worldwide concern for the next 50 years and beyond. Recently, crop yield has fallen in many areas because of declining investments in research and infrastructure, as well as increasing water scarcity. Climate change and HIV/AIDS are also crucial factors affecting food security in many regions. Although agroecological approaches offer some promise for improving yields, food security in developing countries could be substantially improved by increased investment and policy reforms.

Dietary diversity (DD) is universally recognized as a key component of healthy diets. There is still, however, a lack of consensus on how to measure and operationalize DD. This article reviews published literature on DD, with a focus on the conceptual and operational issues related to its measurement in developing countries. Findings from studies of the association between DD and individual nutrient adequacy, child growth and/or household socioeconomic factors are summarized. DD is usually measured using a simple count of foods or food groups over a given reference period, but a number of different groupings, classification systems and reference periods have been used. This limits comparability and generalizability of findings. The few studies that have validated DD against nutrient adequacy in developing countries confirm the well-documented positive association observed in developed countries. A consistent positive association between dietary diversity and child growth is also found in a number of countries. Evidence from a multicountry analysis suggests that household-level DD diversity is strongly associated with household per capita income and energy availability, suggesting that DD could be a useful indicator of food security. The nutritional contribution of animal foods to nutrient adequacy is indisputable, but the independent role of animal foods relative to overall dietary quality for child growth and nutrition remains poorly understood. DD is clearly a promising measurement tool, but additional research is required to improve and harmonize measurement approaches and indicators. Validation studies are also needed to test the usefulness of DD indicators for various purposes and in different contexts.

Higher efficiency rarely reduces water consumption

Human land use threatens global biodiversity and compromises multiple ecosystem functions critical to food production. Whether crop yield-related ecosystem services can be maintained by a few dominant species or rely on high richness remains unclear. Using a global database from 89 studies (with 1475 locations), we partition the relative importance of species richness, abundance, and dominance for pollination; biological pest control; and final yields in the context of ongoing land-use change. Pollinator and enemy richness directly supported ecosystem services in addition to and independent of abundance and dominance. Up to 50% of the negative effects of landscape simplification on ecosystem services was due to richness losses of service-providing organisms, with negative consequences for crop yields. Maintaining the biodiversity of ecosystem service providers is therefore vital to sustain the flow of key agroecosystem benefits to society.

SUMMARY The present study employed the Heckman sample selection model to analyse the two- step process of adaptation to climate change, which initially requires farmers' perception that climate is changing prior to responding to changes through adaptation. Farmers' perception of climate change was significantly related to the age of the head of the household, wealth, knowledge of climate change, social capital and agro-ecological settings. Factors significantly affecting adaptation to climate change were: education of the head of the household, household size, whether the head of the household was male, whether livestock were owned, the use of extension services on crop and livestock production, the availability of credit and the environmental temperature.

BACKGROUND: Sustainable diets are intended to address the increasing health and environmental concerns related to food production and consumption. Although many candidates for sustainable diets have emerged, a consistent and joint environmental and health analysis of these diets has not been done at a regional level. Using an integrated health and environmental modelling framework for more than 150 countries, we examined three different approaches to sustainable diets motivated by environmental, food security, and public health objectives. METHODS: In this global modelling analysis, we combined analyses of nutrient levels, diet-related and weight-related chronic disease mortality, and environmental impacts for more than 150 countries in three sets of diet scenarios. The first set, based on environmental objectives, replaced 25-100% of animal-source foods with plant-based foods. The second set, based on food security objectives, reduced levels of underweight, overweight, and obesity by 25-100%. The third set, based on public health objectives, consisted of four energy-balanced dietary patterns: flexitarian, pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan. In the nutrient analysis, we calculated nutrient intake and changes in adequacy based on international recommendations and a global dataset of nutrient content and supply. In the health analysis, we estimated changes in mortality using a comparative risk assessment with nine diet and weight-related risk factors. In the environmental analysis, we combined country-specific and food group-specific footprints for greenhouse gas emissions, cropland use, freshwater use, nitrogen application, and phosphorus application to analyse the relationship between the health and environmental impacts of dietary change. FINDINGS: Following environmental objectives by replacing animal-source foods with plant-based ones was particularly effective in high-income countries for improving nutrient levels, lowering premature mortality (reduction of up to 12% [95% CI 10-13] with complete replacement), and reducing some environmental impacts, in particular greenhouse gas emissions (reductions of up to 84%). However, it also increased freshwater use (increases of up to 16%) and had little effectiveness in countries with low or moderate consumption of animal-source foods. Following food-security objectives by reducing underweight and overweight led to similar reductions in premature mortality (reduction of up to 10% [95% CI 9-11]), and moderately improved nutrient levels. However, it led to only small reductions in environmental impacts at the global level (all impacts changed by <15%), with reduced impacts in high-income and middle-income countries, and increased resource use in low-income countries. Following public health objectives by adopting energy-balanced, low-meat dietary patterns that are in line with available evidence on healthy eating led to an adequate nutrient supply for most nutrients, and large reductions in premature mortality (reduction of 19% [95% CI 18-20] for the flexitarian diet to 22% [18-24] for the vegan diet). It also markedly reduced environmental impacts globally (reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 54-87%, nitrogen application by 23-25%, phosphorus application by 18-21%, cropland use by 8-11%, and freshwater use by 2-11%) and in most regions, except for some environmental domains (cropland use, freshwater use, and phosphorus application) in low-income countries. INTERPRETATION: Approaches for sustainable diets are context specific and can result in concurrent reductions in environmental and health impacts globally and in most regions, particularly in high-income and middle-income countries, but they can also increase resource use in low-income countries when diets diversify. A public health strategy focused on improving energy balance and dietary changes towards predominantly plant-based diets that are in line with evidence on healthy eating is a suitable approach for sustainable diets. Updating national dietary guidelines to reflect the latest evidence on healthy eating can by itself be important for improving health and reducing environmental impacts and can complement broader and more explicit criteria of sustainability. FUNDING: Wellcome Trust, EAT, CGIAR, and British Heart Foundation.

BACKGROUND: The density of minerals and vitamins in food staples eaten widely by the poor may be increased either through conventional plant breeding or through the use of transgenic techniques, a process known as biofortification. OBJECTIVE: HarvestPlus seeks to develop and distribute varieties of food staples (rice, wheat, maize, cassava, pearl millet, beans, and sweet potato) that are high in iron, zinc, and provitamin A through an interdisciplinary, global alliance of scientific institutions and implementing agencies in developing and developed countries. METHODS: In broad terms, three things must happen for biofortification to be successful. First, the breeding must be successful--high nutrient density must be combined with high yields and high profitability. Second, efficacy must be demonstrated--the micronutrient status of human subjects must be shown to improve when they are consuming the biofortified varieties as normally eaten. Thus, sufficient nutrients must be retained in processing and cooking and these nutrients must be sufficiently bioavailable. Third, the biofortified crops must be adopted by farmers and consumed by those suffering from micronutrient malnutrition in significant numbers. RESULTS: Biofortified crops offer a rural-based intervention that, by design, initially reaches these more remote populations, which comprise a majority of the undernourished in many countries, and then penetrates to urban populations as production surpluses are marketed. In this way, biofortification complements fortification and supplementation programs, which work best in centralized urban areas and then reach into rural areas with good infrastructure. CONCLUSIONS: Initial investments in agricultural research at a central location can generate high recurrent benefits at low cost as adapted, biofortified varieties become available in country after country across time at low recurrent costs.

Farmers in mixed crop-livestock systems produce about half of the world's food. In small holdings around the world, livestock are reared mostly on grass, browse, and nonfood biomass from maize, millet, rice, and sorghum crops and in their turn supply manure and traction for future crops. Animals act as insurance against hard times and supply farmers with a source of regular income from sales of milk, eggs, and other products. Thus, faced with population growth and climate change, small-holder farmers should be the first target for policies to intensify production by carefully managed inputs of fertilizer, water, and feed to minimize waste and environmental impact, supported by improved access to markets, new varieties, and technologies.

In a "nutrition transition", the consumption of foods high in fats and sweeteners is increasing throughout the developing world. The transition, implicated in the rapid rise of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases worldwide, is rooted in the processes of globalization. Globalization affects the nature of agri-food systems, thereby altering the quantity, type, cost and desirability of foods available for consumption. Understanding the links between globalization and the nutrition transition is therefore necessary to help policy makers develop policies, including food policies, for addressing the global burden of chronic disease. While the subject has been much discussed, tracing the specific pathways between globalization and dietary change remains a challenge. To help address this challenge, this paper explores how one of the central mechanisms of globalization, the integration of the global marketplace, is affecting the specific diet patterns. Focusing on middle-income countries, it highlights the importance of three major processes of market integration: (I) production and trade of agricultural goods; (II) foreign direct investment in food processing and retailing; and (III) global food advertising and promotion. The paper reveals how specific policies implemented to advance the globalization agenda account in part for some recent trends in the global diet. Agricultural production and trade policies have enabled more vegetable oil consumption; policies on foreign direct investment have facilitated higher consumption of highly-processed foods, as has global food marketing. These dietary outcomes also reflect the socioeconomic and cultural context in which these policies are operating. An important finding is that the dynamic, competitive forces unleashed as a result of global market integration facilitates not only convergence in consumption habits (as is commonly assumed in the "Coca-Colonization" hypothesis), but adaptation to products targeted at different niche markets. This convergence-divergence duality raises the policy concern that globalization will exacerbate uneven dietary development between rich and poor. As high-income groups in developing countries accrue the benefits of a more dynamic marketplace, lower-income groups may well experience convergence towards poor quality obseogenic diets, as observed in western countries. Global economic policies concerning agriculture, trade, investment and marketing affect what the world eats. They are therefore also global food and health policies. Health policy makers should pay greater attention to these policies in order to address some of the structural causes of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases worldwide, especially among the groups of low socioeconomic status.

ABSTRACT Minerals and vitamins in food staples eaten widely by the poor may be increased either through conventional plant breeding or through use of transgenic techniques, a process known as biofortification HarvestPlus seeks to develop and distribute cultivars of food staples (rice [ Oryza sativa L.], wheat [ Triticum aestivum L.], maize [ Zea mays L.], cassava [ Manihot esculenta Crantz], pearl millet [ Pennisetum americanum Leeke], beans [ Phaseolus vulgaris L.], sweet potato [ Ipomoea batatas L.]) that are high in Fe, Zn, and provitamin A through an interdisciplinary global alliance of scientific institutions and implementing agencies in developing and developed countries. Biofortified crops offer a rural‐based intervention that, by design, initially reaches these more remote populations, which comprise a majority of the undernourished in many countries, and then penetrates to urban populations as production surpluses are marketed. Thus, biofortification complements fortification and supplementation programs, which work best in centralized urban areas and then reach into rural areas with good infrastructure. Initial investments in agricultural research at a central location can generate high recurrent benefits at low cost as adapted biofortified cultivars become widely available in countries across time at low recurrent costs. Overall, three things must happen for biofortification to be successful. First, the breeding must be successful—high nutrient density must be combined with high yields and high profitability. Second, efficacy must be demonstrated—the micronutrient status of human subjects must be shown to improve when consuming the biofortified cultivars as normally eaten. Third, the biofortified crops must be adopted by farmers and consumed by those suffering from micronutrient malnutrition in significant numbers.

Although global food demand is expected to increase 60% by 2050 compared with 2005/2007, the rise will be much greater in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Indeed, SSA is the region at greatest food security risk because by 2050 its population will increase 2.5-fold and demand for cereals approximately triple, whereas current levels of cereal consumption already depend on substantial imports. At issue is whether SSA can meet this vast increase in cereal demand without greater reliance on cereal imports or major expansion of agricultural area and associated biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas emissions. Recent studies indicate that the global increase in food demand by 2050 can be met through closing the gap between current farm yield and yield potential on existing cropland. Here, however, we estimate it will not be feasible to meet future SSA cereal demand on existing production area by yield gap closure alone. Our agronomically robust yield gap analysis for 10 countries in SSA using location-specific data and a spatial upscaling approach reveals that, in addition to yield gap closure, other more complex and uncertain components of intensification are also needed, i.e., increasing cropping intensity (the number of crops grown per 12 mo on the same field) and sustainable expansion of irrigated production area. If intensification is not successful and massive cropland land expansion is to be avoided, SSA will depend much more on imports of cereals than it does today.

This article addresses the potential for food movements to bring about substantive changes to the current global food system. After describing the current corporate food regime, we apply Karl Polanyi's 'double-movement' thesis on capitalism to explain the regime's trends of neoliberalism and reform. Using the global food crisis as a point of departure, we introduce a comparative analytical framework for different political and social trends within the corporate food regime and global food movements, characterizing them as 'Neoliberal', 'Reformist', 'Progressive', and 'Radical', respectively, and describe each trend based on its discourse, model, and key actors, approach to the food crisis, and key documents. After a discussion of class, political permeability, and tensions within the food movements, we suggest that the current food crisis offers opportunities for strategic alliances between Progressive and Radical trends within the food movement. We conclude that while the food crisis has brought a retrenchment of neoliberalization and weak calls for reform, the worldwide growth of food movements directly and indirectly challenge the legitimacy and hegemony of the corporate food regime. Regime change will require sustained pressure from a strong global food movement, built on durable alliances between Progressive and Radical trends.

Population growth, arable land and fresh water limits, and climate change have profound implications for the ability of agriculture to meet this century's demands for food, feed, fiber, and fuel while reducing the environmental impact of their production. Success depends on the acceptance and use of contemporary molecular techniques, as well as the increasing development of farming systems that use saline water and integrate nutrient flows.

This paper examines the effect of both cumulative and transitory exposures to air pollution for the same individuals over time on cognitive performance by matching a nationally representative longitudinal survey and air quality data in China according to the exact time and geographic locations of the cognitive tests. We find that long-term exposure to air pollution impedes cognitive performance in verbal and math tests. We provide evidence that the effect of air pollution on verbal tests becomes more pronounced as people age, especially for men and the less educated. The damage on the aging brain by air pollution likely imposes substantial health and economic costs, considering that cognitive functioning is critical for the elderly for both running daily errands and making high-stake decisions.

Agricultural production is sensitive to weather and thus directly affected by climate change. Plausible estimates of these climate change impacts require combined use of climate, crop, and economic models. Results from previous studies vary substantially due to differences in models, scenarios, and data. This paper is part of a collective effort to systematically integrate these three types of models. We focus on the economic component of the assessment, investigating how nine global economic models of agriculture represent endogenous responses to seven standardized climate change scenarios produced by two climate and five crop models. These responses include adjustments in yields, area, consumption, and international trade. We apply biophysical shocks derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's representative concentration pathway with end-of-century radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m(2). The mean biophysical yield effect with no incremental CO2 fertilization is a 17% reduction globally by 2050 relative to a scenario with unchanging climate. Endogenous economic responses reduce yield loss to 11%, increase area of major crops by 11%, and reduce consumption by 3%. Agricultural production, cropland area, trade, and prices show the greatest degree of variability in response to climate change, and consumption the lowest. The sources of these differences include model structure and specification; in particular, model assumptions about ease of land use conversion, intensification, and trade. This study identifies where models disagree on the relative responses to climate shocks and highlights research activities needed to improve the representation of agricultural adaptation responses to climate change.

This volume deals with land degradation, which is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agro-ecologies, in both low and high income countries and is stretching to about 30% of the total globa