Little is known definitively about the actual consequences that refugees have on food security and resilience in hosting communities. This brief (1) demonstrates why the relationship is not as clear?cut as it seems at first blush; (2) overviews the findings of Mabiso and colleagues, who have reviewed the evidence that does exist on food security and resilience for hosting communities in protracted refugee situations and drawn implications for policymakers;3 and (3) highlights key research gaps that offer promising areas for future research.
An emerging literature shows how the mass arrival of refugees induces both short- and long-term consequences to hosting countries. The main contribution of this paper is to conduct a selective review of this literature from a food-security and resilience perspective. First, the paper identifies a number of direct and indirect food-security consequences of hosting refugees. It provides a conceptual framework for discussing these various channels through which refugee inflows influence food security in the hosting countries. Second, the literature review finds that the impact of large-scale influxes of refugees on host communities and on their food security is unequally distributed among the local population.
Economic shocks including food price shocks, environmental shocks, social shocks, political shocks, health shocks, and many other types of shocks hit poor people and communities around the world, compromising their efforts to improve their well-being. As shocks evolve and become more frequent or intense, they further threaten people’s food and nutrition security and their livelihoods. How do we help people and communities to become more resilient, to not only bounce back from shocks but to also to get ahead of them and improve their well-being so that they are less vulnerable to the next shock? How do we get better at coping with—and even thriving—in the presence of shocks?
In August 2017, FAO was asked by the Commissioner for Refugees (Office of the Prime Minister of Uganda) to support the implementation of a socio-economic analysis within the refugees’ settlements and host communities, with the aim of providing a comprehensive assessment of the current state of the refugees’ food security, well-being and resilience. Although refugees in Uganda are given land and mobility rights, their food security remains low, with a high dependency on food aid. The assumption was that by better understanding refugees’ preferences and livelihoods strategies which determine their resilience, it would be possible to unlock the development potential of the land, increase productivity and help them achieve independence and self-reliance.
This synopsis presents highlights from the international conference Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security, organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and its 2020 Vision Initiative. This global policy consultation was designed to inform, influence, and catalyze action by policymakers, nongovernmental organizations, the private sector, educators, researchers, and communities themselves to incorporate resilience into the post-2015 agenda and improve policies, investments, and institutions to strengthen resilience so that food and nutrition security can be achieved for all. Experts and practitioners from the resilience and vulnerability communities, as well as food and nutrition security, agriculture, humanitarian, and related development sectors came together to assess emerging shocks that threaten food and nutrition security, discuss approaches and tools for building resilience, identify knowledge and action gaps, and set priorities for action on this critical issue. For more information on the conference and its associated activities and products, including papers and briefs, lead-up and follow-up events, videos, posters, a collaborative bibliography, and much more, go to: www.2020resilience.ifpri.info | #2020resilience
This study looks at the causal relationship by which conflict triggers food crises and food insecurity (e.g.by disrupting distribution networks), which in turn perpetuate violence. It proposes intervention mechanisms, including regular cash transfers, for improving food security and sustaining peace.
The INFORMED programme, implemented by FAO from 2015 to 2019, was designed to contribute to “increasing the resilience of livelihoods to threats and crises and contributing to the reduction of food insecurity and malnutrition”. The programme’s increased focused on Early Warning for Early Action (EWEA) was very relevant to fill existing gaps with a comparative advantage for FAO in slow onset and food chain crises contexts. Promoting the use of pre-agreed plans and pre-identified anticipatory actions, the project effectively improved risk analysis and decision making, including through the Global Report on Food Crises, and increased access to appropriate financing instruments, while the EWEA country toolkit initial positive spinoffs remain to be built on.Efforts to support resilience measurement and analyses by applying the resilience index measurement and analysis (RIMA) methodology are relevant given the significant investments in resilience programming and the continuing methodological gaps. However, although RIMA provides a basis for creating evidence on resilience investments, and FAO has been an important pioneer in resilience measurement, a wider system supporting resilience analysis is needed, based on a range of methodologies, responding to the information needs of decision-makers. Also, RIMA baseline lacks sufficient detail to allow articulating the feasibility of possible response options and have a practical impact on planning decisions; it has not demonstrated its added value over pre-existing food security, nutrition and risk indicators to help target interventions, and is not well adapted as an impact evaluation tool.Assessing INFORMED results against its intention to support knowledge production and sharing, to promote the replication of good practices and circular learning, the evaluation questioned the choice of creating a new knowledge management platform versus adopting a collaborative approach building on similar initiatives’ strengths. Poor strategic choices represented a fundamental constraint to reach intended objectives, such as, an insufficient understanding of users explaining the difficulty to trace the uptake and use of knowledge products. Nevertheless, the evaluation recognized the progressive investments in knowledge management and sizeable accomplishments of a relatively small team.The evaluation suggests strengthening capacities for the production and dissemination of forecast, scenario-based early warning as a basis for early action; developing a corporate strategy for partnering to strengthen early warning system capacities at various levels; promoting the use of a toolkit of approaches and investing in a knowledge management function dedicated to capturing and disseminating lessons on the effectiveness of EWEA and resilience interventions.
This volume comprises the relevant legal instruments and principal policy documents in the area of international and European asylum and migration, including the latest versions of pending legislative proposals. The range of issues covered is comprehensive: human rights; nationality and statelessness; equal treatment, non-discrimination, racism and xenophobia; citizenship, residence and free movement; borders, border management and entry; visa and passenger data; labour migration; family reunification; asylum, subsidiary and temporary protection; irregular migration; and trafficking in human beings. The texts have been ordered according to the multilateral co-operation level within which they were drawn up: either the United Nations, the Council of Europe or the European Union (including Schengen-level instruments). This edition provides practitioners, authorities, policy makers, scholars and students throughout Europe with an accurate, up-to-date and forward-looking compilation of essential texts on asylum and migration matters. All texts have been updated until 20 December 2018.
As people increasingly migrate to urban settings and more than half of the world's population now lives in cities, it is vital to plan and provide for sustainable and resilient food systems which reflect this challenge. This volume presents experience and evidence-based "state of the art" chapters on the key dimensions of urban food challenges and types of intra- and peri-urban agriculture. The book provides urban planners, local policy makers and urban development practitioners with an overview of crucial aspects of urban food systems based on an up to date review of research results and practical experiences in both developed and developing countries. By doing so, the international team of authors provides a balanced textbook for students of the growing number of courses on sustainable agriculture, food and urban studies, as well as a solid basis for well-informed policy making, planning and implementation regarding the development of sustainable, resilient and just urban food systems.
This baseline report examines the Refugee Agricultural Value Chains for Economic Self-reliance (RAVES) project in Uganda. The programme adopts an innovative approach, with a focus on providing sustainable long-term solutions beyond humanitarian assistance that mitigate the negative effects of displacement, uplift refugees, and support host communities. The approach allows the refugees to contribute to the economy of the host community without creating social tension. The project supports both refugee and host communities to engage in high value crop value chains, linking them to private sector actors. This baseline report focuses on Uganda and is implemented in Kiryandongo district among both refugees and host communities. The district is predominantly agriculture based and has the biophysical conditions suitable for growing passion fruit. Our analysis suggests that the randomization between treatment and control was fully successful in host communities but less so in the refugees’ settlements. The variations we find between host communities and refugees’ settlements when it comes to demographics, food security, endowment of land and constraints in agricultural production hint towards large structural differences between the two groups. This calls for tailored approaches such as a gender-specific one to address the two communities' specific obstacles to participation in commercial value chains.
