The Global Food Policy Report is IFPRI’s flagship publication. This year’s annual report examines major food policy issues, global and regional developments, and commitments made in 2015, and presents data on key food policy indicators. The report also proposes key policy options for 2016 and beyond to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. In 2015, the global community made major commitments on sustainable development and climate change.

Floodplain wetlands are the major common pool natural resource in Bangladesh. Mostly men fish, and both men and women collect aquatic plants and snails. Case studies contrast a women-only, men-only, and mixed community based organization (CBO), each of which manages a seasonal floodplain wetland. The two CBOs in which women hold key positions are in Hindu communities where more women use aquatic resources, work for an income, and belong to other local institutions. In the oldest of these CBOs, more women have gradually become office bearers as their recognition in the community has grown.

The bargaining power of men and women crucially shapes the resource allocation decisions households make (Quisumbing and de la Brière 2000). Husbands and wives often use their bargaining power to express different priorities about how resources should be allocated. Understanding these differences and their effects is critical if policymakers are to improve livelihoods. Increasing the bargaining power of one gender group rather than another can mean the difference between policy failure and policy success.

Traditional models of household economic behavior have portrayed households as unified entities. They assume that household members agree about decisions and share resources in the most equitable way possible. More recently, however, economists have come to view households as domains of difference, where multiple decisionmakers may have different preferences and, in many cases, control separate sets of resources. This new approach has greatly improved understanding of household resource allocation behavior.

One in every three preschool-aged children living in developing countries is malnourished. This disturbing yet preventable state of affairs causes untold suffering and, given its wide scale, is a major obstacle to the development process itself. Volumes have been written about the causes of child malnutrition and the actions that can be taken to reduce it— ranging from community-based feeding programs to accelerated economic growth (Smith and Haddad 2000).

Policymakers have many options for improving women’s status relative to men’s. The most appropriate set of actions in a given situation will naturally be specific to that context. This chapter outlines some policy actions that have proven successful, as summarized in Table 26.1, and gives some examples of their implementation.

Agrowing body of literature suggests that men and women allocate resources under their control in systematically different ways.

This chapter challenges one of the main tenets of agricultural economics—that households behave as though they are single individuals, with production factors allocated efficiently between men and women. In many contexts this is a convenient and innocuous assumption. It can be quite restrictive, however, when investigating the causes and welfare consequences of gender differences in agriculture.

Much empirical work has approached the problem of how resource allocations are made within households from the perspective that if preferences differ, welfare outcomes depend on the power of individuals to exert their own preferences. Measures of power are therefore a central component of quantitative empirical approaches to understanding how different preferences translate into different welfare outcomes. Following most of the empirical studies in this genre, this chapter focuses on dynamics within couples.

Among financial institutions serving poor households around the world, microfinance programs have emerged as important players. These programs typically make small loans—sometimes as small as US$50 to US$100 and sometimes as large as several thousand dollars-to households lacking access to formal-sector banks (see, for example, Lapenu and Zeller 2001). One important achievement of the microfinance movement has been its relative success in deliberately reaching out to poor women living in diverse socioeconomic environments.

Since 1997 Mexico has provided poor families with cash benefits linked to children’s school attendance and regular clinic attendance, as well as in-kind health benefits and nutritional supplements, through the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA). Unlike previous social programs in Mexico, this nationwide antipoverty program targets transfers to the mother of the family.