By Grace Lerner

Nearly 30 years after the 1984 famine that left more than 400,000 people dead, Ethiopia has made significant progress toward food security. Some of these recent successes include a reduction in poverty, an increase in crop yields and availability, and an increase in per capita income—rising in some rural areas by more than 50 percent!

What happened to cause this breakthrough, and what steps does the country need to stay on track?

ABSTRACT

La recherche sur les politiques alimentaires au service de la réduction de la pauvreté et de la faim

Instability in the price of staple foods is an important source of risk in developing countries. This is particularly true in Africa south of the Sahara because of the low incomes of many African households. Poor urban households allocate a large share of their income to food, so food price volatility affects their purchasing power. Many poor rural households depend on agriculture for their livelihood, so they too are directly influenced by food price volatility.

OUTLOOKS AND GLOBAL CHANGE

Extreme weather, resource scarcity, land degradation, and an exploding global population mounted escalating pressure on the world’s food producers in 2012. The most marginalized, vulnerable populations bore the brunt of these challenges, manifested as food price volatility and threats to food security. IFPRI’s research on global change explores policies, institutions, and investments necessary for smallholders to develop resiliency to these shocks and deftly adapt to global economic and environmental changes.

As the magnitude and scope of the AIDS epidemic grew during the 1990s, it transformed the international development landscape: HIV/AIDS became a global development issue with socioeconomic implications for livelihoods, rather than an isolated health issue. In response to this crisis, the Regional Network on AIDS, Livelihoods, and Food Security (RENEWAL) was officially launched in 2001 as a joint project of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR).

The sector-wide approach currently dominates as the strategy for developing the agricultural sector of many African countries. Although it is recognized that agricultural research plays a vital role in ensuring success of sectorwide agricultural development strategies, there has been little or no effort to explicitly link the research strategies of the National Agricultural Research System (NARS) in African countries to the research agenda that is articulated in sectorwide agricultural development strategies.

The performance of the International Food Policy Research Institute’s (IFPRI’s) research program that focuses on water resource issues is reviewed for the period 1994–2010 around the three themes that constitute the program: global modeling, river basin modeling, and institutions.

ABSTRACT