Overseas Development Institute - Theme: Food

ODI Blog Posts - Somalia food aid diversion

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 17:00:00 -0700

As the alleged diversion of food aid in Somalia hits the headlines, this blog calls for a reality check amid the moral outrage. It points out that Somalia is an extreme context, with lawless areas and an economy intricately tied into local power structures and the ongoing conflict. The economic ‘rules of the game’ are different than in Western countries, with a fine line between what is legal and illegal, what is corrupt and what is normal business. While it is crucial that corruption is minimised, the focus should be on open conversations, not investigations.

View full details

ODI Background Notes - Turning crisis into opportunity for children affected by HIV and AIDS: responding to the financial, fuel and food crises

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0800

There has been no comprehensive review of the impacts of the financial, fuel and food crises on children and caregivers affected by HIV and AIDS. This is critical, given that the mortality rate among infected children is disproportionate to that faced by adults, and that relatively fewer children have access to necessary antiretroviral therapy (ART). There is a risk that children living with the disease or highly vulnerable to infection will remain invisible in the crisis unless they receive urgent policy attention. The findings of ODI research with UN, Government and NGO staff in Rwanda, Zambia, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho, Thailand, Paraguay and the Philippines suggest that the main concerns for children affected by HIV and AIDS lie in budget cutbacks, alongside contraction of specific funds, either planned or because of currency devaluation, and increased drug import costs.

View full details

ODI in the media - Interview in BBC Radio 4 The World Tonight: "Food Aid to Somalia " (Sarah Bailey)

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:00 -0800

ODI Blog Posts - High food prices - what policies work best?

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0800

When world food prices shot up in 2007-8, lots of countries hastened to put in place emergency policy measures ranging from food export bans to food vouchers many of which were quite different from well-meaning advice they were given by economists and international agencies. How did it all pan out? This blog discusses early findings from an ODI study and workshop.

View full details

ODI Working Papers 314 - Impact of the global financial and economic situation on agricultural markets and food security

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:00:00 -0800

Agricultural prices have fallen heavily since their peaks in the first half of 2008: some are already at the levels seen in early 2007 before the recent spike began. Thanks in part to economic downturn, prices are expected to continue falling in 2009. Prices of inputs such as fertiliser and oil, and ocean freight rates, have also come down; and by even larger fractions than those of outputs.

Increasingly it seems that the price spike was an extraordinary event caused by an unusual combination of mainly short-term factors, including harvest failures, higher oil prices and the associated acceleration of US ethanol production exacerbated by excessive reactions to rising prices by limiting exports and restocking in tight markets. The spike, however, was superimposed on a medium term trend of rising real prices caused partly by the falling value of the US dollar, rising aggregate demand and monetary expansion, and the slow-down in the growth of cereals outputs since the mid-1980s in which production has fallen behind population growth.

The economic downturn and outright recession in OECD countries can be expected to depress growth in the developing world, through reduced financial flows — investment in stock markets, banking capital, foreign direct investment and remittances, and through lower demand in markets pushing down commodity prices and reducing tourism receipts. Some countries will see their currencies depreciate as their current accounts weaken. While this will raise the threat of inflation, it will also stimulate exports and depress demand for imports and so help correct trade imbalances.

Overall, the impacts will be almost certainly be deflationary. World Bank forecasts see reduced growth across all regions of the developing world, although growth will still be positive and recessions are not expected.

Wider variations in impacts can be expected from country to country, depending on economic structure, integration into global financial markets, and the strength of the economy as seen in foreign exchange reserves, fiscal deficits, and external debt. Marked differences between middle and low income countries are likely, with further differentiation depending on the trade balance in oil and foods.

Food security and nutrition depend on the incomes of the poor and local price levels of foods, as well as general health conditions. So many intermediate variables intervene that making ex ante predictions risks too much guessing. Hence here the experiences of Indonesia, Mexico and Zambia when facing economic recessions in the 1990s have been reviewed.

This shows the expected correlation between economic recession and rising rates of poverty. But there are some signs in these cases that the poor found ways to buffer themselves a little against hard times. Less obviously, the nutrition data for young children does not show any clear sign of deterioration in these economic crises, suggesting that while poverty and hardship may have intensified, long-term damage to the prospects of infants did not take place — or at least not on a scale large enough to show up in national surveys.

View full details

Public event - Developing country responses to the food price spike: what have we learned?

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:00:00 -0800

29 January 2010 13:00-14:30
Overseas Development Institute
Also streamed online

This meeting presented the results of research into reactions by developing country governments and non-governmental organisations to moderate the effects of the 07/08 food price crisis.

View full details for this event

Background paper - Food Price Crisis Frequently Asked Questions

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:00:00 -0800

The issue of rising food prices came to international attention in early 2008. This document answers the following questions about the crisis and responses to it:

What has happened to food prices and why?
Why are food prices important & where can we find them?
How have countries and the international community responded?
The future

View full details

Video blog - Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) video channel - CTA Weblog and weekly Newsletter: Dr Steve Wiggins, Overseas Development Institute

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:00:00 -0800

Dr Steve Wiggins is our guest. Dr Steve Wiggins is an experienced agricultural economist with interests in rural livelihoods, poverty, food security and nutrition who has worked extensively in Africa and Latin America. He leads work at the Overseas Development Institute on agricultural development, food prices and biofuels. Mr. Wiggins talks about spike food prices and the four major transitions that concern agriculture: the transition energy, water scarcity, the impacts of gas emissions and the consequences of climate change.

View full details

ODI in the media - Quote in Financial Times Deutschland : "The search for a fresh recipe" (Steve Wiggins)

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:00:00 -0800

Conference - The impact of the global food, fuel, and financial crises and policy responses: A child-sensitive approach

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:00:00 -0800

09 - 10 November 2009

This conference will convene development practitioners, policy experts and academic researchers from around the world to examine the ways in which the food and fuel price volatility, financial market volatility and global economic slowdown are affecting children and youth in both developing and developed countries and recommend policy responses.

View full details for this event

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in One World: "Food security 'a myth'" (Steve Wiggins)

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Citation in examiner.com: "The poor struggle for bargaining power in land disputes - world leaders aren't turning blind eye"

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Article in Financial Times Letters: "Poverty, not food shortages, leads to hunger (letter)" (Adrian Hewitt)

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:00:00 -0700

Background paper - Current state of food security in Africa and the Africa–EU partnership on the Millennium Development Goals

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:00:00 -0700

This paper, prepared for Second Joint Experts Group Meeting, Africa-EU MDGs Partnership, Sub Group on Priority Action 2: Accelerate the Food Security targets of the MDGs, (24 March 2009, Pretoria) has been drafted to summarise the current state of food security in Africa and relate this to activities that form part of the EU-Africa partnership on the Millennium Development Goals, that would allow keys gaps in the programme to be identified.

The recent record on hunger and malnutrition

FAO (2008) estimates that in 2003/05 the number of Africans who were undernourished was around 217M, out of 848M inhabitants, about one quarter the population. While since the early 1990s the proportion of people living in hunger has fallen —for Sub-Saharan Africa, the fraction has been reduced from 34% to 30% — absolute numbers have been rising. Progress towards meeting Indicator 5 of the MDGs, halving the proportion not getting an adequate intake of food, has been minimal. That said, there are great variations across the regions of the continent and between countries.

n North Africa and West Africa have markedly lower prevalence of undernourishment than other parts of the continent, with fractions below 5% and at 14%, respectively in the most recently reported period;

n Prevalence has been rising in Central Africa and, fractionally, in North Africa. Elsewhere prevalence has fallen since the early 1990s;

n The only part of Africa that has reduced prevalence at the rate necessary to meet the MDG target for 2015 is West Africa,

Looking at the nutrition of infants, seen in stunting levels in national surveys since 1990, the record shows much variation. In general, however,

n For the 27 countries for which statistics exist, 17 show lower rates of stunting for the most recent survey compared to the earliest, while only 10 show a deterioration. Overall it seems, nutrition is improving; but,

n Levels of stunting are often high, at rates of one third or more. Even when surveys showing falling levels of malnutrition, improvements are often small. Hardly a single country — Senegal may be an exception —looks as though it will halve the level of stunting seen in the early 1990s by 2015.

In sum, the picture is diverse. In the broadest terms, both series of statistics tend to show an improvement in undernourishment and stunting; but generally the rate of progress has been slow and well behind that needed to meet the MDG targets. There is, however, great diversity of experience across countries suggesting that the most reliable insights may only apply in national analyses.

Factors influencing hunger and malnutrition

Statistics have been collected to examine the three sets of factors expected to affect food security: food availability, access to it, and utilisation of food.

Availability per capita of staple food — cereals, roots and tubers —in Africa has been rising since the mid-1990s. With more than 2,500 kcal available per person, there is enough to feed everyone adequately — Africa rates more highly than South Asia on this measure.

There is much variation in both the levels of food availability and trends since 1990 across regions and between countries. Generally, Northern and Western Africa show higher levels and rising trends: performance in the rest of the continent is more variable.

As proxy indicators for access to food, the record on economic growth per capita, the value of agricultural production against rural population as a rough measure of rural incomes, and reported poverty rates were examined.

View full details

ODI in the media - Interview in BBC Radio 4 The Today Programme Today: "Mike Thomson examines Africa's biggest ever private land deal" (Steve Wiggins)

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:00:00 -0800

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in IRIN Global: "Donor response to food crisis inadequate, agencies say" (Steve Wiggins)

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Citation in IPS Europe: "The Appetite Is for Money" (Steve Wiggins)

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in Relief Web: "Donor response to food crisis inadequate, agencies say" (Steve Wiggins)

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in Reuters AlertNet: "Tough talk needed to keep aid money flowing"

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in Reuters AlertNet: "VIEWPOINT: How do you think beyond food aid in a conflict?" (Sara Pantuliano)

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in IRIN Humanitarian News and Analysis Reports: "WEST AFRICA: Do high food prices warrant a cash response?" (Paul Harvey)

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:00:00 -0700

ODI in the media - Comment/Quote in IRIN Global: "Food aid on the back burner as WTO talks collapse" (Ed Clay)

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 17:00:00 -0700