Although the Malawian food supply is shaped largely by trends in smallholder food crop production, Malawi’s decades-long focus on improving smallholder productivity has only moderately improved food security and nutrition outcomes. Country statistics indicate an estimated 36.7 percent of rural Malawian households failed to access sufficient calories between 2010 and 2011. During the same period, 47 percent of children under the age of five years were estimated to be stunted in their growth. These indicators imply that some Malawian diets are lacking in terms of quantity (total calories consumed), and most are lacking in terms of quality (sufficient calories derived from nutrient-dense foods, such as meat, fish, eggs, dairy, legumes, fruits, and vegetables). Good nutrition requires both enough total calories (quantity) and enough vitamins and minerals per calorie (quality). How can Malawi better leverage its smallholder agriculture sector to improve nutrition? This report provides a series of primary and secondary data analyses that examine different aspects of this question.
New evidence this year corroborates the rise in world hunger observed in this report last year, sending a warning that more action is needed if we aspire to end world hunger and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. Updated estimates show the number of people who suffer from hunger has been growing over the past three years, returning to prevailing levels from almost a decade ago. Although progress continues to be made in reducing child stunting, over 22 percent of children under five years of age are still affected. Other forms of malnutrition are also growing: adult obesity continues to increase in countries irrespective of their income levels, and many countries are coping with multiple forms of malnutrition at the same time – overweight and obesity, as well as anaemia in women, and child stunting and wasting.
Agriculture's vast potential to improve nutrition is just beginning to be tapped. New ideas, research, and initiatives developed over the past decade have created an opportunity for reimagining and redesigning agricultural and food systems for the benefit of nutrition. To support this transformation, the book reviews the latest findings, results from on-the-ground programs and interventions, and recent policy experiences from countries around the world that are bringing the agriculture and nutrition sectors closer together. Drawing on IFPRI's own work and that of the growing agriculture-nutrition community, this book strengthens the evidence base for, and expands our vision of, how agriculture can contribute to nutrition. Chapters cover an array of issues that link agriculture and nutrition, including food value chains, nutrition-sensitive programs and policies, government policies, and private sector investments. By highlighting both achievements and setbacks, Agriculture for Improved Nutrition seeks to inspire those who want to scale up successes that can transform food systems and improve the nutrition of billions of people.
This report analyses PIM’s 391 peer-reviewed 2018 and 20191 publications. We highlight key gender findings and discuss the challenges faced by researchers in doing gender analysis, with a view to documenting lessons learned and improving practices. It is hoped that the gaps and strengths identified in this report will be useful inputs for future research under PIM and One CGIAR.
This report answers the question: “What guidelines can be used to identify the types of agricultural investments that have the highest economic return, where “agriculture” is broadly defined to include primary production, handling, storage, transportation, distribution, processing, and retailing?” Using the literature and MCC’s ERR analyses, we explain how agricultural investments fit in a wider development context, identify information useful to MCC’s decision making that is not provided by the ERR analyses, and suggest IFPRI tools for exploratory and ex-ante evaluative analysis that MCC can use in their decision-making process.
A large proportion of Malawian households are caught in a trap where poverty and food insecurity reinforce one another and where periods of food deficits and severe food crises are frequent occurrences. In recognition of this, the Malawian government has since 2005/06 implemented a large-scale Farm Input Subsidy Program (FISP), which supplies half of smallholder farmers with sufficient fertilizer and maize seeds to satisfy the maize consumption needs of an average-sized family. While the program boosted maize production and lowered maize prices, thus ensuring increased caloric availability at the household level, its effect on overall food consumption, dietary diversity, micronutrient deficiency, and child nutrition is less clear. This study evaluates household expenditure survey data to measure changes in nutrition outcomes between 2004/05 and 2010/11.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of agrifood systems to shocks and stresses and led to increased global food insecurity and malnutrition. Action is needed to make agrifood systems more resilient, efficient, sustainable and inclusive. The State of Food and Agriculture 2021 presents country-level indicators of the resilience of agrifood systems. The indicators measure the robustness of primary production and food availability, as well as physical and economic access to food. They can thus help assess the capacity of national agrifood systems to absorb shocks and stresses, a key aspect of resilience. The report analyses the vulnerabilities of food supply chains and how rural households cope with risks and shocks. It discusses options to minimize trade-offs that building resilience may have with efficiency and inclusivity. The aim is to offer guidance on policies to enhance food supply chain resilience, support livelihoods in the agrifood system and, in the face of disruption, ensure sustainable access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to all.
The IFPRI 2020 Conference on Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health was held in New Delhi, India, February 1012, 2011, and attracted more than 900 attendees. Conference activities included 12 plenary sessions, 15 parallel sessions, 14 side events, an ongoing knowledge fair with more than 25 exhibit booths and tables, six informal discussion groups, and roughly 30 rapid fire presentations during coffee breaks. Assessing the impact of this Conference is a task complicated by multiple issues such as assessment coverage and impact attribution. The assessment methods used here include surveys of conferees, Internet searches, website and literature searches, and extensive personal interviews. Distinctions are drawn between short-term and medium-term impacts, and also among impacts on individuals, on institutions, and on professional discourse. Impacts on individual conferees were measured through pre- and post-Conference surveys and telephone interviews. The impacts on the substantive views of those who attended the Conference were found to be small. Most conferees (75 percent) came to Delhi already convinced that a cross-sector approach to agriculture, nutrition, and health (ANH) was appropriate. At the individual level, the Conference impacted motivation and empowerment more than beliefs. The Conference gave those who attended new information, new networking opportunities, and various positioning advantages that made them more effective within their own institutions back home. Such advantages were primarily important in the short term. Regarding impacts on institutions, the 2020 Conference produced important but mixed results. Direct impacts on national governments were small, in part because ministerial structures and bureaucratic routines in governments are traditionally segregated by sector, and resistant to anything more than incremental change. Direct impacts from the 2020 Conference on private companies and NGOs were also modest, but for a different reason: these institutions are inherently comfortable working across sectors, so most of the private companies and NGOs participating in the Conference felt little need to change. The strongest institutional impacts from the Conference came within a category of organizations that wanted to integrate nutrition with agriculture, but were unsure of how, or how quickly, to move forward. These institutions included the CGIAR itself as it moved to create the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (CRP4); the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as it responded to an internal evaluation of its own work in nutrition; and a number of donor institutions including most prominently the UKs Department for International Development (DFID), which used the materials and policy energy generated by the 2020 Conference to help guide and push a major expansion of bilateral funding into the ANH arena. These DFID responses alone were a large enough payoff to mark the Conference a success. A third significant impact from the Conference was on professional discourse. The 2020 Conference helped change the conversation about agriculture and food security by boosting the frequency of reference to cross-sector impacts on both nutrition and health. Impact measurement becomes difficult here, because the Conference was not the only initiative highlighting cross-sector linkages underway. Nonetheless, the average number of Google Internet hits per search for the phrase linking agriculture, nutrition, and health increased from 9,288 in the pre-Conference period to 13,508 in the immediate post-Conference period of MarchMay 2011. Searches of organization websites revealed that 18 of 21 of the sites had more links to agriculture, nutrition, and health issues immediately following the Conference compared to just before, and 20 of 21 had an even higher number of such links one year later in July 2012. The most obvious limitation on impact has been at the level of national government policy (excluding donor policies). Partly this reflects attendance. Only 19 percent of those who attended the 2020 Conference were government officials, compared to 41 percent who came from research institutes or universities. Yet, even where Conference impacts on governments might have seemed probable, they have proved (so far) to be mostly tentative or modest. The government of Malawi co-hosted its own version of the 2020 Conference in Lilongwe in September 2011. While this was an important step, the Conference was donor-suggested and donor-funded, and senior officials from the Ministry of Health were unable to attend.In Uganda, the 2020 Conference helped sustain an effort to mainstream nutrition within the Ministry of Agriculture. However, this effort was underway before the Conference, and parallel efforts from USAID, WFP, and FAO did as much to sustain it.In China, the leadership of the State Food and Nutrition Consultation Committee was briefed on 2020 Conference materials, which may have helped to establish a new (but already approved) food safety and nutrition development institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Since Chinese leaders had been unable to attend the Conference itself, impacts in the country also depended heavily on a separate outreach effort by IFPRI leadership.In India, national officials and researchersand IFPRImade concerted efforts to use the Conference to shape language in the new 12th Five-Year Plan (201216). While some engaged in this effort claimed progress in that direction, nothing definitive has emerged and in India it appears that little has changed in the traditional separation between the agriculture ministry and the nutrition and health sectors. The Conferences largest impacts within India were felt at the individual level, at the level of discourse, or within some state administrations, not within national governmental institutions. What can one reasonably expect when looking for impacts from a single international Conference? In the case of the 2020 Conference in Delhi, where the goal was to change the way individuals and institutions were thinking about ANH issues and considering them in professional discourse, measurable progress was made toward each of these goals in both the short term and the medium term. IFPRI took a risk by designing the Delhi Conference to challenge traditional paradigms. This assessment shows that, in both the short term and medium term, the risk has been rewarded.
This conference focused on how agricultural strategies can best be tailored to the Malawian context and result in improvements for nutrition and health. It is crucially important to make linkages--the best agricultural practices will not succeed in improving the nation's nutritional status if there is not good nutritional care and access to health services.
Unless action is taken now to make agriculture more sustainable, productive and resilient, climate change impacts will seriously compromise food production in countries and regions that are already highly food-insecure. The Paris Agreement, adopted in December 2015, represents a new beginning in the global effort to stabilize the climate before it is too late. It recognizes the importance of food security in the international response to climate change, as reflected by many countries prominent focus on the agriculture sector in their planned contributions to adaptation and mitigation. To help put those plans into action, this report identifies strategies, financing opportunities, and data and information needs. It also describes transformative policies and institutions that can overcome barriers to implementation. The State of Food and Agriculture is produced annually. Each edition contains an overview of the current global agricultural situation, as well as more in-depth coverage of a topical theme."
