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About IFPRI
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Established in 1975, IFPRI currently has more than 500 employees working in over 50 countries. It is a research center of theCGIAR Consortium, a worldwide partnership engaged in agricultural research for development.
Vision and Mission
IFPRI’s vision is a world free of hunger and malnutrition. Its mission is to provide research-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition.
What We Do
Research at IFPRI focuses on six strategic areas:
- Ensuring Sustainable Food Production: IFPRI’s research analyzes options for policies, institutions, innovations, and technologies that can advance sustainable food production in a context of resource scarcity, threats to biodiversity, and climate change. READ MORE
- Promoting Healthy Food Systems: IFPRI examines how to improve diet quality and nutrition for the poor, focusing particularly on women and children, and works to create synergies among the three vital components of the food system: agriculture, health, and nutrition. READ MORE
- Improving Markets and Trade: IFPRI’s research focuses on strengthening markets and correcting market failures to enhance the benefits from market participation for small-scale farmers. READ MORE
- Transforming Agriculture: The aim of IFPRI’s research in this area is to improve development strategies to ensure broad-based rural growth and to accelerate the transformation from low-income, rural, agriculture-based economies to high-income, more urbanized, and industrial service-based ones. READ MORE
- Building Resilience: IFPRI’s research explores the causes and impacts of environmental, political, and economic shocks that can affect food security, nutrition, health, and well-being and evaluates interventions designed to enhance resilience at various levels. READ MORE
- Strengthening Institutions and Governance: IFPRI’s research on institutions centers on collective action in management of natural resources and farmer organizations. Its governance-focused research examines the political economy of agricultural policymaking, the degree of state capacity and political will required for achieving economic transformation, and the impacts of different governance arrangements.
Research on gender cuts across all six areas, because understanding the relationships between women and men can illuminate the pathway to sustainable and inclusive economic development.
IFPRI also leads two CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs): Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) andAgriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).
Beyond research, IFPRI’s work includes partnerships, communications, and capacity strengthening. The Institute collaborates with development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, farmers’ organizations, and other partners around the world.
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Resources
Displaying 1486 - 1490 of 1493Government credit programs: Justification, benefits, and costs
Subsidized credit programs for agricultural producers have often been used to boost production in less developed countries.
The Humid and Subhumid Tropics
The humid and subhumid tropics in African regions where rainfall exceeds potential evapotranspiration for five months or more include most of the area from Guinea through central Africa plus the southern part of East Africa. They cover 12 million square kilometers, or 43 percent of the total land area, and include the humid forest zone of central Africa. Rainfall is over 1 thousand millimeters per annum.
Commentaries on the Trade Regime
Oyejide's chapter poses the problem of choice of policy instruments. As political motivations dominate in many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the choice of policy instruments has been very often erratic. Oyejide clearly illustrates this dilemma. Protection under an inward-looking regime combined with overevaluation has directed resources away from the agricultural sector in Nigeria, inflicting heavy cost on rural consumers and producers while subsidizing urban consumers.
Nutrition Situation and its Food Policy Links
Malnutrition is generally not perceived to be a pervasive problem in much of Africa, except during famines. There is little doubt that in "average" years, malnutrition in Africa is a smaller problem than it is in Asian countries such as Bangladesh, India, Nepal, or Sri Lanka. Another reason why nutritional problems do not receive much attention in Africa is that in recent years episodes of severe drought, famine, and starvation have been relatively frequent, and attention has focused more on the shorter-run alleviation of food problems than on longer-term underlying problems.
Rural poverty, agricultural production, and prices: a reexamination
In his insghtfull but unfinished work, Dharm Narain drew attention to the behavior of prices as one of the important factors determining the extent of poverty in rural India. His empirical investigations, summarized in Gunvant Desai's contribution to this volume (chap. 1), provide strong prima facie evidence of such influence. Dharm Narain found that rural poverty is not only inversely related to the level of output per head of the rural population, as established in Ahluwalia (1978a), but also positively related to the level of prices.