The 2011 Global Food Policy Report is a new annual IFPRI publication that provides a comprehensive, research-based analysis of major food policy challenges at the global, regional, national, and local levels. It highlights important developments and events in food policy that occurred in 2011, discusses lessons learned, offers policy recommendations, presents IFPRI’s food policy tools and indicators, and takes a look forward into 2012. The Report reflects perspectives from across the globe.

While early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure land rights has kindled renewed interest, in view of increased demand for land, a range of individual and communal rights available under new laws, and reduced costs from combining information technology with participatory methods. We used a difference-in-difference approach to assess the effects of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years, on investment.

In view of the 2012 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s thematic focus on rural women’s empowerment, the gender team at the Development Centre has launched an issues paper, “Do discriminatory social institutions matter for food security?”.

Women play important roles as producers of food, managers of natural resources, income earners, and caretakers of household food and nutrition security. Giving women the same access to physical and human resources as men could increase agricultural productivity, just as increases in women’s education and improvements in women’s status over the past quarter century have contributed to more than half of the reduction in the rate of child malnutrition.

This paper presents an overview and synthesis of the key research and capacity building issues arising from the workshop presentations and the papers.

Up until the end of the 1980s the Peruvian public administration played a central role in irrigation systems throughout the country; this changed in 1989 when operational management of the systems was transferred to water users associations (WUAs). This sudden move required new management capacities for such organizations, demands that were not catered for at the time.

Developing farmers' institutional capacity to defend their water rights is central to sustaining irrigation farming in the UK. Increasing demand and competition for water and the introduction of new water regulations have led many farmers to re-evaluate the security of their water rights.

Intellectual property rights long remained a matter dealt with in vague terms of general policy at international agricultural research centers (IARCs). This situation changed at the turn of the century, when intellectual property (IP) became an object of a major institution-building process at three centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). This article analyzes why and how policies were grounded and made operational in terms of new intellectual property structures and procedures.

Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. A combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall (until the food crisis of 2007/08) in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from undernutrition (from 20% in 1990/92 to 16% in 2006). Yet over a billion people still face both chronic and/or transitory food insecurity due to long-standing problems of inadequate income, low-productivity in agricultural production and marketing, and related problems of poor health and absence of clean water.

This publication outlines the process undertaken by UN Habitat/GLTN and The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Representation in Kenya to support the Ministry of Lands, Physical Planning and Urban Areas Management of the Turkana County Government-Kenya, in establishing a county Land Information Management System based on the Social Tenure Domain Model (STDM). The project was carried out in the context of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) program entitled, Support for Responsible Land and Natural Resource Governance of Communal Lands in Kenya.

• There is an accute lack of well-located urban housing that is adequate, secure, and affordable. The global affordable housing gap is currently estimated at 330 million urban households and is forecast to grow by more than 30 percent to 440 million households, or 1.6. billion people, by 2025.