Food Policy Research Institute Research Articles

Faltering fisheries and ascendant aquaculture: Implications for food and nutrition security in Bangladesh

Bangladesh has made considerable progress against human development indicators in recent years, but malnutrition resulting from poor dietary diversity and low micronutrient intakes remains entrenched. Fish is central to the Bangladeshi diet and small fish species are an important micronutrient source. Although fish consumption per capita has increased in recent years as a result of rapid expansion of aquaculture, it is likely that consumption of fish from capture fisheries (including small indigenous species particularly rich in micronutrients), has declined. This paper evaluates data on fish consumption collected in Bangladesh by the International Food Policy Research Institute in 1996/7 and 2006/7 to assess changing patterns of fish consumption and their implications for food and nutrition security. This analysis indicates that growth of aquaculture has been positive, mitigating a sharp reduction in the quantity of fish consumed from capture fisheries and smoothing out seasonal variability in consumption. However, increased availability of fish from aquaculture may not have fully compensated for the loss of fish from capture fisheries in terms of dietary diversity, micronutrient intakes and food and nutrition security, particularly for the poorest consumers. A range of approaches are recommended to sustain and enhance the contributions capture fisheries and aquaculture make to food and nutrition security in Bangladesh

3rd Annual Conference of the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH), Developing methods in agriculture and health research, London, 13–14 June 2013

Agriculture and health interact in complex ways via food systems and nutrition, creating positive and negative synergies, which differ according to economic, political and environmental contexts, but particularly affecting the lives of vulnerable populations in low-income countries. Research in these subjects has historically proceeded in relative isolation, with different disciplines applying distinct methods to generate knowledge and inform sector-based policy and practice. This segregated working is not beneficial if research is to inform the design and implementation of programs and policies that aim to fully and sustainably address the nexus of agriculture and health. Encouragingly, policy and programmatic initiatives, as well as research endeavours, have been increasingly attentive to the linkage of agriculture and health as a method for improving nutritional status and health (Masset et al. 2012). More and better multi-sectoral action will be necessary, however, to reduce the harms and enhance the benefits of the agriculture-health relationship, and research increasingly needs to engage with this complex picture if findings are to remain relevant to policy and practice. In response to this interdisciplinary challenge, the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH) was established in 2010 with a grant from the Leverhulme Trust to develop “unifying approaches and methodologies for understanding the relationship between agricultural production and population health, and the factors which drive them both”an agri-health research agenda (www.lcirah.ac.uk). Since its inception, LCIRAH has hosted three international conferences endeavouring to bring together experts from different sectors to share perspectives and explore integrated inter-disciplinary approaches to global agri-health challenges. In 2011, the first conference, organised with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), had a strong focus on agri-health metrics, with scholars presenting work on ways in which metrics and methods can cross disciplines to fill knowledge gaps. The conference found a potentially huge benefit in promoting the understanding and utilization of different methods across disciplines to move the agri-health research agenda forward. The second conference, in 2012, J. Harris :M. Bruce : E. Cavatorta : L. Cornelsen :B. Hasler : R. Green : E. H.Morgan : S. Stevano :H. L.Walls :K. Cunningham Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (LCIRAH), London, UK

A Sub-group Decomposition of Land Inequality in the Limpopo River Basin of South Africa

Land inequality in South Africa is a problem that is deeply rooted in land use policy of the dethroned apartheid government. Although land reform is advocated as a means for rectifying the havocs of the past and ensuring that economic development process that favours the poorest segments of the population is set in motion, government has faced a lot of difficulties in its implementation. This study therefore analyzed the degree of inequality in the Limpopo River Basin. The data were collected by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Centre for Environmental Economics and Policy in Africa (CEEPA) in 2005. Data analysis was implemented with descriptive statistics and Gini sub-group inequality decomposition. Results show that land inequality was high with over all Gini being 0.9212. Also, inequality between the groups accounted for the highest share of total Gini. It was recommended that efforts at ensuring equity in land ownership should be speeded up with due consideration of inequality across the districts.

Economic impacts of changes in wheat’s import tariff on the Sudanese economy

This study quantifies the impacts of change in wheat’s import tariffs on gross domestic product (GDP) and its components, wheat imports, sorghum exports, and domestic production of wheat and sorghum in the Sudan. The study objective is to provide a deep insight of the issue in concern to stakeholders affiliated with food security. As a method of analysis, the study uses a standard computable general equilibrium model, designed for developing countries by the International Food Policy Research Institute. Sudan’s Social Accounting Matrix for the year 2004, disaggregated for agriculture, has been used as core database. Different scenarios have been postulated and simulated.Changes in import tariff of wheat had broad inter-linkages among all sectors of the economy. Reduction of wheat tariff has increased wheat imports; associated with a decrease of imports of other agricultural, industrial and services sectors. Increasing wheat imports could lower the domestic price and, hence, reduce the resources directed to its production. The overall effect is an improvement of GDP, balance of trade, and investment, and decreased private consumption. Increasing import tariff on wheat would reduce its imports and encourage its production for self-sufficiency, with less efficiency and negative impact on GDP.Domestic production of wheat is highly variable over time, and falls short of satisfying the demand, whereas wheat consumption is increasing over time. Encouraging innovation of convenient and fast food industry using domestic traditional grains is recommended to curb wheat consumption. Furthermore, wheat imports should be conditioned on availability of hard currency, domestic production capacity, and food gap, while maintaining stable exchange rate that strikes a balance between encouraging sorghum exports and wheat imports. This should be associated with increased investment in stabilizing and increasing wheat production, and remedy the predicaments facing agriculture.

The effect of rising food prices on food consumption: systematic review with meta-regression

Objective To quantify the relation between food prices and the demand for food with specific reference to national and household income levels.Design Systematic review with meta-regression.Data sources Online databases of...

The Policy Landscape of Agricultural Water Management in Pakistan

Irrigation is central to Pakistan’s agriculture; and managing the country’s canal, ground, and surface water resources in a more efficient, equitable, and sustainable way will be crucial to meeting agricultural production challenges, including increasing agricultural productivity and adapting to climate change. The water component of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s Pakistan Strategy Support Program (PSSP) is working to address these topics through high-quality research and policy engagement. As one of the first activities of this program, the PSSP undertook this assessment of the policy landscape for agricultural water management in Pakistan, to better understand how to engage with stakeholders in the landscape, and to assess possible opportunity points for improving water conservation.The authors use the Net-Map method, an interview tool that combines stakeholder mapping, power mapping, and social network analysis, to examine the relationships between various institutions influencing the water sector in Pakistan. Group interviews were conducted with national stakeholders in Islamabad and with provincial stakeholders in Lahore to establish separate influence maps at the different scales. Interviewees were asked about four types of network relationships: formal authority, informal pressure, technical information, and funding. Network data was analyzed using social network analysis software and notes from interviews add further depth to the network observations. Concluding discussion focuses on the distribution of power and influence in the network and on the opportunities and challenges of recent governance reforms and implications for stakeholder engagement.

Big Data Is a Big Deal

Guest editorial The global population is forecast to grow to about 10 billion people by the middle of this century. While this population growth will generate a growth in global GDP, it will also create significant stresses on resources needed to feed the population and fuel its economic growth, with the demand for food-water-energy creating a “stress nexus.” The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations predicts that by 2030 demand for food will increase by 50%. The International Food Policy Research Institute expects demand for water to increase by 30%. And the International Energy Agency forecasts that energy demand will surge by 50%, despite projected progress in improving consumption efficiencies. Alternative fuels are forecast to find ready markets and increase their percentage of the energy mix, yet oil and gas are still expected to deliver about 60% of the energy needs of the future. For example, in 2040 the exploration and production (E&P) sector is projected to be faced with delivering about 30% more oil production liquids, about 110 million b/d of oil equivalent, than it does today. The E&P industry is expected to find and develop new types of resources through innovations in technology used in deep water, the Arctic, oil sands, tight oil, unconventional gas, biofuels, and other areas. However, two major issues will mute and limit that success: Manpower. As demand increases, the need for manpower increases and manpower availability decreases. Simultaneously, experienced people will retire and exit the industry in record numbers. Data and knowledge. Our current knowledge of existing reservoirs and our practices are based on partial data. It is a truism in the business world that 80% of business-relevant information originates in unstructured forms. In the E&P industry, where “natural data” cannot be ordered and constricted to the confines of “manmade” databases, the percentage of unstructured data can be substantially higher. In the domain of criminal justice, The Innocence Project has shown that partial data can lead to partial truths, in some cases leading to incarceration of innocent people. In many of those cases, DNA evidence not considered in earlier jury trials has exonerated innocent people who spent decades in prisons. Partial data can lead to partial truths. The E&P industry has had success working with partial data and partial truths but it is imperative that it work with more and better data, or “Big Data,” to get closer to the whole truth, and to ensure greater success so vital to meet projected future demand of a growing global population. Both challenges mentioned above could be met by focusing attention on creating a unified data store that is a ready platform to apply computational algorithms and analytics to extract patterns from both structured and unstructured data. These patterns can then be used to create models with forecasting, anticipatory, or predictive capabilities that reduce the cones of uncertainty or increase the probabilities of success of actions in the E&P industry.

Forecasting framework of rice crises time in Bandung-Indonesia

In an effort to give policymakers of food crisis alerts, International Food Policy Research Institute developed a new tool for the early warning system for identifying extreme price of agricultural products. The World Bank is currently developing a framework of monitoring the food price crisis in the global and national levels. This framework focused on price and did not examine other factors that govern the food crisis. Development is not directed to define the time of food crisis but for operational indicators that can monitor how close food prices to a level which is categorized crisis. The indicators are used to predict global food price spike that occurred in June 2008 and February 2011. Analyzes were conducted to select indicators that sounded an alert about the crisis. The best one is then used to monitor where current global prices stand with respect to the selected crisis threshold .The weakness of the monitoring frame work done by World Bank and International Food Policy Research Institute above is that maybe we will never seen rice price hike, but we may can still see the rice crises. We may have no natural disaster but we may still have the rice crises caused by miss management. To overcome the weaknesses of the models studied on recently

Optimal Expectations and the Welfare Cost of Climate Variability

We show that increased climate variability (a proxy for future income uncertainty) reduces farmers’ subjective well-being, consistent with the theory of optimal expectations (Brunnermeier & Parker, 2005), using panel data from rural Ethiopia and a new data set containing daily atmospheric parameters. The magnitude of our result indicates that a one standard deviation (7%) increase in climate variability has an equivalent e↵ect on life satisfaction to a two standard deviation (1-2%) decrease in consumption. This e↵ect is one of the largest determinants of life satisfaction in rural Ethiopia. (JEL: C25, D60, I31.) 1First draft: June 2012. Alem: Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, yonas.alem@economics.gu.se. Colmer: The Grantham Research Institute and Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, UK. E-mail: j.m.colmer@lse.ac.uk. We are grateful to Allen Blackman, Je↵ery Bookwalter, Gharad Bryan, Douglas Dalenberg, Paul Dolan, John Feddersen, Greer Gosnell, Cameron Hepburn, Derek Kellenberg, Peter Martinsson, Kyle Meng, Rob Metcalfe, Eric Neumayer, Jonathan Parker, Hendrik Wol↵ and seminar participants at the EfD 6th Annual Meeting, EAERE, the University of Oxford, London School of Economics, University of Montana, and Resources for the Future for helpful thoughts, comments and discussions. The first author would like to thank the Swedish International Development Agency (Sida) through the Environment for Development Initiative (EfD) at the University of Gothenburg, and the Swedish Research Council Formas through the Human Cooperation to Manage Natural Resources (COMMONS) programme for financial support. Part of this research was done while Alem was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of California Berkeley. The second author would like to thank the ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy and the Grantham Foundation for financial support. The data used in this article were collected by the University of Addis Ababa, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the Centre for the Study of African Economies (CSAE). Funding for the ERHS survey was provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). All errors and omissions are our own.

Gender Relations and Effect of Credit Availability on Household Expenditure: Evidence from Rural Bangladesh

AbstractTo improve the well‐being of individuals, development policies not only have to take into account how resources are allocated within the family or household but also look at the impact of this resource allocation on individuals. The objective of this article is to understand how intrahousehold dynamics (e.g., variations in household bargaining behaviors) lead to differences in outcomes of specific interest (e.g., food and non‐food expenditure). The household bargaining model is used to study the effects of credit, both formal and informal, on consumption choices. The focus is on the household expenditure patterns and participation in the credit market is taken as the measure of bargaining between the head and the spouse. This article uses the International Food Policy Research Institute's Food Management and Research Support Project (IFPRI‐FMRSP) household survey of Bangladesh for the years 1998–99. OLS is used to estimate the food share and personal care share equations, and Tobit models are used to estimate the 10 other non‐food budget shares. Our results indicated that more men compared to women participate in the credit market. Amount of credit taken by the male household head negatively affects food expenditure and positively affects the share spent on adult goods. The negative effect on food expenditure has policy implications related to nutritional intake and educational attainment of children in the household. Women's use of credit has a positive impact on the expense of children's goods, durable goods, education, and housing. The results show that resources in the hands of women have implications for improvement in child outcomes, especially educational outcomes.

A whole-economy model of the health co-benefits of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the UK

BackgroundThe UK Government has set specific targets for greenhouse gas emissions to lower the risk of dangerous climate change. Previous research has shown that important health co-benefits could result from strategies targeting the domains of transport, built environment, and agriculture. This study assesses the full general equilibrium economy-wide macroeconomic effects of health co-benefits from three similar UK strategies to meet locally specific 2030 greenhouse gas emission targets. MethodsEconomy-wide effects of health co-benefits were modelled with a dynamic extension of the widely used International Food Policy Research Institute standard computable general equilibrium model for 2011–30. Four forms of economic agents are modelled: firms (who combine resource inputs to maximise profits), consumers (who consume and save to maximise their welfare), government, and foreign agents. The method consists of simulation of three greenhouse gas policy scenarios and a counterfactual do-nothing scenario. Basic health co-benefits (years lived with disability [YLD] and years of life lost [YLL]) were measured for a range of illnesses, on the basis of the comparative risk assessment approach. Combined with incidence numbers and prevalence trends, these basic YLD (morbidity) and YLL (mortality) co-benefits were used to calculate dynamic sequences of demographic and labour market effects on population and productive labour supply, and public budget implications for averted health-care costs and increased social security transfers (including benefit payments for working-age individuals and pension payments for old-age individuals). These economic shocks were subsequently imposed on the computable general equilibrium model and used to measure the combined macroeconomic effect of health co-benefits. The method for measuring averted health-care costs was published in The Lancet in 2012. Three scenarios were modelled: active travel (transport sector; health co-benefits of an assumed transformation of urban transport behaviour to reduce motorised transportation and increase walking [2·5-times] and cycling [8·0-times] in urban England and Wales); healthy diet (food and agriculture sector; health co-benefits of an assumed UK-wide 30% reduction in consumption of dietary saturated fat); and household energy (household energy sector; health co-benefits of an assumed UK-wide improvement in home insulation and ventilation, including reduced household energy use, improved indoor temperature, and associated changes in indoor pollutants). FindingsFor all scenarios, the macroeconomic effects of health co-benefits are positive. Overall, substantial savings on health-care costs represent the main contributing factor. Increased labour supplies also contribute positively, whereas increased social security transfers (due to larger working-age and old-age population segments) detract. The largest potential cumulative gross domestic product gains from health co-benefits are associated with the active travel scenario (around £19 billion), in which increased physical activity averts large-scale and long-term chronic disease burdens and health-system costs. The healthy diet scenario also leads to important potential gains (around £5 billion), whereas the full potential health co-benefits from the household energy scenario will not be realised until beyond 2030. Three economic sensitivity analyses were undertaken to test the sensitivity of results to variations in assumptions concerning: the substitutability of labour for other factors of production; the effectiveness of the interventions; and changes in the discount rate (the present value of the economic effects). Overall, the core results can be considered relatively robust to changes in these three factors. InterpretationStrategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve health are likely to result in substantial and increasing positive contributions to the economy. This effect might offset some economic costs and thereby allow such strategies to be seen more favourably, especially in times of economic austerity. FundingDepartment of Health Policy Research Programme.

Sustainable Management of Biodiversity Using Science & Technology

Biodiversity conservation, sustainable food security and green economy are very closely linked and there is an urgent need to use this three pronged approach to meet the challenges to biodiversity management. The terms ‘green economy’ and ‘food security’ are often used very broadly, therefore, for easy comprehension; green economy refers to enhancing economic growth in perpetuity, without associated ecological and/or social harm. Food Security refers to physical, economic and social access to balanced diet, clean drinking water, sanitation and primary health care for every child, woman and man. The food insecurity atlas developed jointly by M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and World Food Programme (WFP) is an Awareness–Analyses and Action plan document that ranks all the different states in the country, on the above mentioned parameters. Food security basically has 3 components: the first is food availability, which depends on food production and imports. The second is food access, which depends on purchasing power and employment opportunities. The third, food absorption, is a function of safe drinking water, environmental hygiene, primary health care and education. The path towards sustainable development varies from state to state, those with a strong natural resource base ranked high in sustainability but did not produce enough food. Some of the findings reported were to remove pressure on land and water and conserve natural resources for sustainable water supply in Tamil Nadu; increase land productivity, diversify agriculture, improve infrastructure and provide market linkages in Orissa, and to some extent in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. In states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, population stabilization holds the key to sustainable food security. More than 50 % of India’s currently favourable high potential wheat production area may get re-classified as heat stressed, lower potential, short season growing environment. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has reported that there will be a fall in wheat production in south Asia by almost 45 million tonnes by 2050 if adequate, adaptive measures are not practiced. The projections for wheat production losses in India by 2050 are estimated to be 6 million tonnes per year or 1.3 billion USD at current prices, due to rise in mean temperature by 1–2 C. There is an urgent need to bring about a transformational change such as the Green Revolution in 1968 which worked like a symphony between technology, services, public policy and farmer’s enthusiasm. There have been timely early warning signals given to policy makers on sustaining food production by shunning the practice of exploitative agriculture involving indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides; rampant over use of water resources and loss of biodiversity as locally adapted varieties get replaced by high yielding crops. Current lifestyles and extensive consumption of natural resources have expanded the ecological footprint and is a major threat to food security as the human demand to the biosphere services has more than doubled since 1961. An ever green revolution has become essential which primarily aims at increased agricultural production in perpetuity, without associated ecological harm. A combination of green agriculture, organic cultivation practices with integrated pest management and nutrient supply and natural resource management is important for the country. India being an agricultural-based economy, if farm ecology and economics go wrong, nothing else will go right. There is need to integrate farm and mainstream technology into M. S. Swaminathan (&) M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, III Cross Street, Institutional Area, Taramani, Chennai 600113, India e-mail: swami@mssrf.res.in

Understanding Economic Transformation in Africa Through Country Studies

Abstract Economic transformation typically entails changes in the structure of output and the movement of labor from rural to urban areas as the significance of agriculture declines. In most rich countries, this process is accompanied by industrialization. Little is known about this process in Africa at least in part because of a lack of reliable data. To bridge this gap in knowledge, each of the six Africa based country strategy support programs of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) commissioned papers on economic transformation in Africa. The countries studied are Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria and Uganda. In May 2011, IFPRI together with Ghana's Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) hosted a conference in Accra in May 2011 where the papers were presented and discussed. These papers are published in this volume and this note provides an introduction to these papers.

A model‐based quantitative assessment of the carbon benefits of introducing iLUC factors in the European Renewable Energy Directive

AbstractThe European Commission has a mandate from the EU's Renewable Energy and Fuel Quality Directives to propose a methodology, consistent with the best available science, to address indirect land use change (iLUC). One proposed solution to the iLUC problem is the application of iLUC factors in European fuels policy – it is widely expected that should the EU adopt such iLUC factors, they would be based on iLUC modelling using the International Food Policy Research Institute's (IFPRI) MIRAGE model. Taking the iLUC factors from IFPRI MIRAGE as our central estimate, we use Monte Carlo analysis on a simple model of potential biofuel pathways for Europe to assess the likely average carbon saving from three possible European biofuel policy scenarios: no action on iLUC; raised GHG thresholds for direct emissions savings; and the introduction of iLUC factors. We find that without iLUC factors (or some other effective iLUC minimization approach) European biofuel mandates are unlikely to deliver significant GHG emissions benefits in 2020, and have a substantial probability of increasing net GHG emissions. In contrast, the implementation of iLUC factors is likely to significantly increase the carbon savings from EU biofuel policy. With iLUC factors, it is likely that most permitted pathways would conform to the Renewable Energy Directive requirement for a minimum 50% GHG reduction compared to fossil fuels.

Michelle Adato and John Hoddinott (eds.), Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press with the International Food Policy Research Institute, 2011), pp. xviii + 386, £44.00, hb.

Michelle Adato and John Hoddinott (eds.), Conditional Cash Transfers in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press with the International Food Policy Research Institute, 2011), pp. xviii + 386, £44.00, hb.

WATER RATES AND THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF DIRECT, INDIRECT AND END-USERS IN SPAIN

Irrigation is the main user of water in Spain, and the price paid for this resource has long been lower than its cost. The recent EU Water Framework Directive requires that all costs be recovered, but application has had perverse effects. In some cases, farms have become economically unviable, while in others, cultivation has intensified and water consumption has increased. This paper applies a slightly modified version of the computable general equilibrium model developed by the International Food Policy Research Institute (Lofgren et al., 2002), to a SAM (Social Accounting Matrix) of the province of Huesca in north-eastern Spain. The model disaggregates the agricultural sectors into irrigated and unirrigated farming, taking into account the improvements in irrigation efficiency. Within this framework, we analyse different payment scenarios affecting direct users, exporters and end-users in order to examine user responsibilities, the impact of international markets and macroeconomic effects on agriculture and industry in Spain.

Agricultural Extension, Transactions Costs, and Supply Response: Discussion

American Journal of Agricultural EconomicsVolume 94, Issue 2 p. 393-394 ASSA Meeting Invited Paper Session Agricultural Extension, Transactions Costs, and Supply Response: Discussion Xiaobo Zhang, Corresponding Author Xiaobo Zhang [email protected] International Food Policy Research Institute[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Xiaobo Zhang, Corresponding Author Xiaobo Zhang [email protected] International Food Policy Research Institute[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 25 October 2011 https://doi.org/10.1093/ajae/aar115Citations: 1 This article was presented in an invited paper session at the 2011 ASSA annual meeting in Denver, CO. The articles in these sessions are not subjected to the journal's standard refereeing process. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume94, Issue2January 2012Pages 393-394 RelatedInformation

Hilary Clinton Visit to IFPRI

Thank you so much, Director General, for not only those remarks but for the work that is done every day here at this premier organization designed to come forward with sustainable solutions for ending hunger and poverty. And I want to thank the International Food Policy Research Institute for hosting me today and for the leadership you show in a key area of global development – helping governments design and implement successful policies for reducing hunger and undernutrition.

Agriculture and the Wealth of Nations: 2010 CAER‐IFPRI annual conference summary

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to summarize the China Agricultural Economic Review (CAER)'s second annual conference, which was organized by the CAER editorial office and International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).Design/methodology/approachThe conference theme was “Agriculture and the Wealth of Nations”, aiming to explore the importance of agriculture as well as the relationship and interaction between agriculture and the whole economy. The attendees from 14 countries discussed the related issues, and a number of distinguished scholars and policy makers were also invited to present at the conference. This summary presents the topics covered at the conference and highlights discussion points.FindingsAction items were identified which could be appropriately organized into the following sections: agricultural trade and rural labor issues; rural governance and public policy; climate change and food security; rural land and rural finance issues.Originality/valueThe paper illustrates how the academic platform established by the CAER‐IFPRI conference, enables scholars from varied cultures and fields to get together to share their researches and ideas.

The Potato Value Chain in Bihar: An Assessment and Policy Implications

The Potato Value Chain in Bihar: An Assessment and Policy Implications