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Monitoring the agri-food system in Myanmar: Mechanization Service Providers – July 2024 survey round
No full textAgricultural mechanization service providers (MSPs) are crucial for enabling smallholder farmers to undertake a range of power-intensive farm and post-harvest operations in a timely manner. These operations are essential for food production and farm income. MSPs are capital-intensive operations. The economic viability of these businesses is highly sensitive to (1) capacity utilization, which generates the cash flow needed to repay equipment loans; (2) prices of imported capital goods, including machines, equipment, and fuels; and (3) availability of machine operators, among others. Hence, the operations of MSPs are sensitive to restrictions on mobility and trade.MyanmarSSPDevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG
2024 annual trends and outlook report: Advancing the climate and bioeconomy agenda in Africa for resilient and sustainable agrifood systems
No full textReSAKSSDevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG); AF
Myanmar’s agrifood system: Historical development, recent shocks, future opportunities
No full textMyanmar has endured multiple crises in recent years — including COVID-19, global price instability, the 2021 coup, and widespread conflict — that have disrupted and even reversed a decade of economic development. Household welfare has declined severely, with more than 3 million people displaced and many more affected by high food price inflation and worsening diets. Yet Myanmar’s agrifood production and exports have proved surprisingly resilient.MyanmarSSP; MAPSADevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG
Vulnerability and welfare during multiple crises
No full textThe triple transition that took place between 2011 and 2019 in Myanmar—from a planned to an open market economy, from military to civilian rule, from conflict to peace—was not without its limitations. As discussed in Chapter 1, poverty reduction was modest relative to economic growth, a fully democratic system was not established, and ethnic conflict continued in many areas. In this mixed context of social welfare improvements and unfulfilled reforms, COVID-19 hit—the first in a series of crises. The pandemic had an immediate adverse impact on Myanmar’s economy and pushed many households into poverty. Then, while the country remained under threat from the pandemic, in February 2021, the military took over in a coup, and Myanmar fell into a political crisis. Declines in welfare accelerated for many. One year later, the Myanmar economy faced sharp rises in prices for food, fuel, and fertilizer as a result of a global economic crisis triggered by the start of the conflict in Ukraine. This triple crisis—pandemic, political, economic— has had enormous impacts on welfare and livelihoods in Myanmar. (Chapter 1 summarizes how the triple crisis unfolded; refer to that chapter for details on the causes, levels, and apparent consequences of the sequence of shocks.)Development Strategies and Governance (DSG); Foresight and Policy Modeling (FPM
Introduction [in Advancing the climate and bioeconomy agenda in Africa for resilient and sustainable agrifood systems]
No full textTaken together, long-term dynamics such as demographic changes, urbanization, and a continent-wide nutrition transition pose a complex set of challenges to African agrifood systems. These challenges are further compounded by the frequent and extreme weather events linked to the deepening climate crisis, whose effects range from prolonged droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks, to rising sea levels, increasing heatwaves, and changing rainfall patterns. Left unmitigated, the likely effects on agricultural yields and productivity, infrastructure, broader economic growth, and community livelihoods risk unraveling the progress made in improving food security and nutrition, as well as alleviating poverty. In one of the latest illustrations of climate change impacts across Africa, several thousand people lost their lives in Libya after torrential rain caused two dams to collapse in September 2023. The recent El Niño–induced droughts and floods across Southern Africa have led the United Nations and its partners to call for urgent action, as more than 30 million people across the region face the effects of severe drought. The consortium has warned that millions could be pushed into acute hunger unless support is urgently mobilized before the next lean season (WFP 2024). These shocks are seriously disrupting production cycles and hampering the ability of countries to guarantee food security for their populations.ReSAKSSDevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG
Adaptation actions to climate change in African agriculture: Effectiveness and challenges
No full textClimate change poses a significant burden to African development and economic growth, impacting households at both national and regional levels. While accounting for only 3–4 percent of global emissions, Africa is most vulnerable to climate change due to low levels of socioeconomic growth (Kikstra et al. 2022). Africa’s vulnerability to climate change is exacerbated by its reliance on rain-fed agriculture, environmental degradation, inadequate infrastructure, widespread poverty, and increased frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters. These factors make Africa highly susceptible to climate-related disruptions such as droughts and floods and can amplify the impact of climate-related disasters on communities, economies, and ecosystems (UNECA 2013; WMO 2020). Effective adaptation strategies and risk financing mechanisms are crucial for building regional adaptive capacity and resilience.ReSAKS
Synopsis: Enhancing rural income diversification in Rwanda: Opportunities and challenges
No full textThis study describes the employment patterns of rural households in Rwanda and explores their challenges and opportunities for rural income diversification. Detailed analysis using a 2022 rural household smallholder survey on agricultural production and employment in Rwanda, reveals that: • Agricultural wage labor is the dominant source of off-farm income and is the primary means of supplementing rural household income. This is different than other LMICs where households are more likely to develop nonfarm enterprises that bring in extra income and diversify the rural economy towards more value-added output while also increasing demand for rural inputs. • This research suggests that factors like access to education and financial services are key factors to employment decisions and improved rural urban linkages.Rwanda SSPDevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG
Climate shocks and fertilizer responses: Field-level evidence for rice production in Bangladesh
No full textThe fertilizer response of yield has been one of the major indicators of agricultural productivity in both developed and developing countries. Filling the evidence gap remains vital regarding fertilizer response in Asia, particularly in South Asia, given the evolution and emergence of new challenges, including intensifying climate shocks. We aim to partly fill this knowledge gap by investigating the associations between climate shocks and fertilizer response in Bangladeshi rice production. Using three rounds of nationally representative farm household panel data with plot- level information, we assess fertilizer response functions regarding rice yield and how the shapes of these response functions are heterogeneous in relation to anomalies in temperatures, droughts, and rainfall. We find robust evidence that climate anomalies have adverse effects on fertilizer responses, including higher temperatures for the Boro and the Aman irrigated systems and higher temperatures and droughts for the Aman rainfed systems. These findings hold robustly under various fertilizer response function forms, i.e., polynomial function and stochastic Linear Response Plateau. Furthermore, results for stochastic Linear Response Plateau are also consistent for both switching regression type models and Bayesian regression models.CSISADevelopment Strategies and Governance (DSG); Innovation Policy and Scaling (IPS
An approach for assessing whether agricultural projects help smallholders transition to better livelihood strategies: A Malawian case study
No full textAgricultural projects typically aim to promote the uptake of project components amongst targeted small farm populations to improve their farm productivity and welfare. While this approach can be an important first step towards improving smallholder livelihoods, it ignores alternative and often superior livelihood options that might arise within the rural transformation process, particularly in commercial agriculture and the rural nonfarm economy. We argue that the design of smallholder projects implemented within regions already undergoing a dynamic transformation and/or projects which have significant value chain components, should be broadened to assist smallholders in making successful transitions to their best livelihood options. For such projects, monitoring and evaluation activities should track livelihood transitions as well as the usual assessments of productivity and welfare outcomes. To help operationalize such an approach, we propose a typology of smallholder livelihood strategies that can track transitions over time and illustrate its use with data from the Sustainable Agricultural Production Program (SAPP), an agricultural value chain project in Malawi. Using available household panel data and quasi-experimental econometric approaches, we find that the project helped smallholders transition out of subsistence farming to market-oriented farming and helped already existing market-oriented farmers remain as such. Even though the project did not have any specific components designed to promote off-farm incomes, nevertheless, it facilitated many farm household transitions to off-farm diversified livelihoods, possibly due to spillover benefits generated within the local nonfarm economy. All SAPP facilitated transitions led to increases in household incomes. We conclude with some lessons for designing, monitoring, and the evaluation of future agricultural projects.Foresight and Policy Modeling (FPM
Measuring consumption over the phone: Evidence from a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia
No full textThe paucity of reliable and timely household consumption data in many low- and middle-income countries have made it practically impossible to assess how global poverty has evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the burst of phone surveys, there has been few attempts to collect household consumption data. To test the feasibility of collecting consumption data over the phone, we conducted a survey experiment in urban Ethiopia, randomly assigning a balanced sample to either a phone or an in-person interview. The average value of per capita consumption is 23 percent lower, and the estimated poverty headcount is twice as high in the phone survey relative to the in-person survey. We see evidence of survey fatigue occurring early on in phone interviews but not in in-person interviews, and the bias is correlated with household characteristics. While the phone survey mode provides lower costs, it cannot replace in-person surveys for household consumption measurement.Non-PRIFPRI1; CRP4; 2 Promoting Healthy Diets and Nutrition for allMTID; DSGD; A4NHCGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH