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About IFPRI
The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in developing countries. Established in 1975, IFPRI currently has more than 500 employees working in over 50 countries. It is a research center of theCGIAR Consortium, a worldwide partnership engaged in agricultural research for development.
Vision and Mission
IFPRI’s vision is a world free of hunger and malnutrition. Its mission is to provide research-based policy solutions that sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition.
What We Do
Research at IFPRI focuses on six strategic areas:
- Ensuring Sustainable Food Production: IFPRI’s research analyzes options for policies, institutions, innovations, and technologies that can advance sustainable food production in a context of resource scarcity, threats to biodiversity, and climate change. READ MORE
- Promoting Healthy Food Systems: IFPRI examines how to improve diet quality and nutrition for the poor, focusing particularly on women and children, and works to create synergies among the three vital components of the food system: agriculture, health, and nutrition. READ MORE
- Improving Markets and Trade: IFPRI’s research focuses on strengthening markets and correcting market failures to enhance the benefits from market participation for small-scale farmers. READ MORE
- Transforming Agriculture: The aim of IFPRI’s research in this area is to improve development strategies to ensure broad-based rural growth and to accelerate the transformation from low-income, rural, agriculture-based economies to high-income, more urbanized, and industrial service-based ones. READ MORE
- Building Resilience: IFPRI’s research explores the causes and impacts of environmental, political, and economic shocks that can affect food security, nutrition, health, and well-being and evaluates interventions designed to enhance resilience at various levels. READ MORE
- Strengthening Institutions and Governance: IFPRI’s research on institutions centers on collective action in management of natural resources and farmer organizations. Its governance-focused research examines the political economy of agricultural policymaking, the degree of state capacity and political will required for achieving economic transformation, and the impacts of different governance arrangements.
Research on gender cuts across all six areas, because understanding the relationships between women and men can illuminate the pathway to sustainable and inclusive economic development.
IFPRI also leads two CGIAR Research Programs (CRPs): Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) andAgriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH).
Beyond research, IFPRI’s work includes partnerships, communications, and capacity strengthening. The Institute collaborates with development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, farmers’ organizations, and other partners around the world.
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Resources
Displaying 1286 - 1290 of 1521Managing droughts in the low-rainfall areas of the Middle East and North Africa
Drought is a recurrent and often devastating threat to the welfare of countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) where three-quarters of the arable land has less than 400 mm of annual rainfall, and the natural grazings, which support a majority of the 290 million ruminant livestock, have less than 200 mm. Its impact has been exacerbated in the last half century by the human population increasing yearly at over 3%, while livestock numbers have risen by 50% over the quinquennium.
External shocks and domestic poverty alleviation
Two sets of issues loom large on the economic horizon of Malawi: poverty alleviation and the country’s vulnerability to shocks emanating from the outside world. In this paper, simulations with a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model of Malawi are used to analyze aspects of these issues. Two types of poverty-alleviating domestic policy shifts are simulated: a public works program and a land reform program. The public works program may function as an absorber of negative shocks elsewhere in the economy.
Collective action for water harvesting irrigation in the Lerma-Chapala Basin, Mexico
Water and watersheds are difficult to separate for management purposes. Providing irrigation as a supplement to rainfall for crop production requires considerable collective action at the watershed level to mobilize labor and other resources, as well as to make decisions and implement the distribution of benefits. Small-scale water harvesting irrigation systems in Mexico have endured for centuries.
Land lease markets and agricultural efficiency
This paper develops a theoretical model of land leasing that includes transaction costs of enforcing labor effort, risk pooling motives and non-tradable productive inputs. We test the implications of this model compared to those of the “Marshallian” (unenforceable labor effort) and “New School” (costlessly enforceable effort) perspectives using data collected from four villages in Ethiopia. We find that land lease markets operate relatively efficiently in the villages studied, supporting the New School perspective relative to the other two models.
Conditional cash transfers and their impact on child work and schooling
In this paper we investigate whether a conditional cash transfer program such as the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) can simultaneously combat the problems of low school attendance and child work. PROGRESA is a new program of the Mexican government aimed at alleviating extreme poverty in rural areas. It combats the different causes of poverty by providing cash benefits that are targeted directly to households on the condition of children attending school and visiting health clinics on a regular basis.