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• identifying and analyzing alternative international, national, and local policies in support of improved food security and nutrition, emphasizing low-income countries and poor people and the sound management of the natural resource base that supports agriculture;
• contributing to capacity strengthening of people and institutions in developing countries that conduct research on food, agriculture, and nutrition policies; and
• actively engaging in policy communications, making research results available to all those in a position to apply or use them, and carrying out dialogues with those users to link research and policy action.

Background:

Intended Outputs:

Output 1: Capacity strengthening activities with NARS in developing countries that reflect the real needs of the targeted individuals and institutions for meeting agricultural development, poverty, hunger alleviation and natural resource management while also decreasing gender and regional imbalances through applying appropriate capacity strengthening strategies.

Output 2: Improved understanding of the impact of capacity strengthening on individuals, institutions, and decision-making to ensure that the appropriate approaches are used and to enhance the contribution of capacity strengthening programs to the quantity and quality of human and institutional capacity.

Output 3: Share global knowledge, in the form of improved approaches for developing curricula, learning materials, and delivery methods in strengthening capacity for agricultural research and food policy analysis, through the adoption of an open learning resources approach to address the major constraint of limited capacity in developing countries to actually implement action for pro-poor and sustainable agricultural growth.

Progress and Impact:

The results of a climate change adaptation project in the Ethiopian Nile and South African Limpopo basins find that a large majority of small farmers are aware of long-term changes in temperature and precipitation and their potential adverse impacts on food production and livelihoods. Only about half the farmers, however, have adjusted their practices to account for the effects of climate change, due to a number of constraints. The main barriers cited by survey respondents are lack of credit(in South Africa) and lack of information (in Ethiopia). Climate change adaptation strategies at the national level for agriculture and water should target these concerns, as well, as more common adaptation methods such as improving water storage and providing irrigation facilities.

Protection and subsidies in industrialized countries have been shown to have large negative effects on developing countries. An IFPRI developed trade scenario demonstrated that if the applied tariffs of major economies would increase up to the highest permissible rate limits, world trade would decrease by 7.7%. In a more modest scenario where countries would raise tariffs to maximum rates applied during the past 13 years, world trade would decrease by 3.2%. These increases in duties would reduce world welfare by US$353 billion under the first scenario and by US$134 billion under the more modest scenario. While such an increase in duties would particularly impact agricultural exports (-6.9%), especially in developing countries (-11.5%), exports of industrial goods could also face a substantial reduction: 2% in developed countries and 4.8% in developing countries. Research found that failure to conclude the Doha Round and subsequent protectionist policies would lead to a potential loss of US$1,064 billion in world trade. Failure of negotiations would prevent a US$336 billion increase in world trade coming from a reduction in tarrifs and domestic support, while worldwide resort to protectionism would contract world trade by US$728 billion.

Irrigation plays a relatively small role in Sub-Saharan Africa’s agriculture, compare with Asia and Latin America’s. However, concerns over food security and a persistent lag in agricultural productivity have re-focussed attention on key investments – in particular, irrigation and fertilizer – for Africa’s agricultural development. Global warming is expected to further boost the productivity-enhancing effects of irrigation in the region. As only 4% of cultivated area is irrigated and most area is concentrated in just three countries, adequate policy and strategic frameworks for irrigation and water have yet to be developed in most countries, and baseline data on which to assess progress on irrigation performance indicators is sparse. Also among the key challenges to further irrigation development in the region are the lack of availability of complementary agricultural inputs, including fertilizer, advanced seed delivery systems, postharvest processing facilities and access to markets and low levels of expertise, knowledge and capacity to develop and manage irrigation. Based on an IFPRI spatial analysis tool combining hydro-geographic and economic parameters, profitable expansion of dam-based, large scale irrigation (associated with reservoirs deemed profitable from a hydropower investment perspective) of 2.5 million hectares, for an on-farm investment cost of $7.5 billion, could be identified for 24 selected Africa Investment Country Diagnostic countries. A much larger potential- 10 million hectares – was identified for small-scale irrigation using a similar methodology. Additional potential exists for the rehabilitation of existing schemes but that will require a thorough analysis of the causes of underlying systems on a case-by-case basis. While the potential for irrigation is very large, profitability is highly sensitive to initial investment costs.

General Notes:

Read the id21 Research Highlight:
Increasing women farmers’ access to information in rural Uganda.

List of donors

This is one of the research institutes under the umbrella of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). The institutes have been funded by DFID for a number of years on a rolling year by year basis, the funding refers to the current year only. Total DFID funding - £1,995,000 since 01/04/2008.

See the overall record for core funding of international agricultural research including the CGIAR centres.

Publications: