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Biotechnology, agriculture, and food security in Southern Africa
No full textBiotechnology disputes fall into the ever-expanding category of policy disputes characterized by multidimensionality and complexity. By their very nature, these disputes are centered around politically charged issues of allocation of rights to resources, as well as distribution of the benefits and costs of technological change. They typically involve a high degree of scientific uncertainty, long time horizons, and decisionmaking at multiple jurisdictional levels. Such disputes are therefore likely to pose exacting challenges. They involve a wide range of political, economic, social, and scientific considerations. Their satisfactory resolution therefore requires multistakeholder participation in a process of finding and maintaining a dynamic balance between political and technical priorities. In this process civil society can provide much of the expertise and creative thinking that is required to identify needs, generate innovative policy options, and implement agreements while governments retain their preeminent functions of ultimate decisionmaking.PRIFPRI2; Science and Technology; PBSDSGD; CO
progress and problems in confronting hunger and poverty
No full textPolicy research on African agriculture is long on prescriptions for what needs to be done to spur agricultural growth but short on how such prescriptions might be implemented in practice. What explains this state of affairs? What might be done to correct it, and, most important, how? This paper addresses these questions via a comprehensive review and assessment of the literature on the role and impact of research in policy processes. Six major schools of thought are identified: the rational model; pragmatism under bounded rationality; innovation diffusion; knowledge management; impact assessment; and evidence-based-practice. The rational model -- with its underlying metaphor of a 'policy cycle' comprising problem definition and agenda setting, formal decision making, policy implementation, evaluation, and then back to problem definition and agenda setting, and so on -- has been criticized as too simplistic and unrealistic. Yet it remains the dominant framework guiding attempts to bridge gaps between researchers and policy makers. Each of the other five schools relaxes certain assumptions embedded within the rational model -- e.g., wholly rational policy makers, procedural certainty, well-defined research questions, well-defined user groups, welldefined channels of communication. In so doing, they achieve greater realism but at the cost of clarity and tractability. A unified portable framework representing all policy processes and capturing all possible choices and tradeoffs faced in bridging research, policy, and practice does not currently exist and is unlikely ever to emerge. Its absence is a logical outcome of the context-specificity and social embeddedness of knowledge. A fundamental shift in focus from a 'researcher-as-disseminator' paradigm to a 'practitioner-as-learner' paradigm is suggested by the literature, featuring contingent approaches that recognize and respond to context-specificity and social embeddedness. At bottom, the issue is how to promote 'evidence-readiness' among inherently conservative and pragmatic policy makers and practitioners and 'user-readiness' among inherently abstraction-oriented researchers.Non-PRIFPRI1DSG
illustrated using phytoremediation
No full textPollution of the environment by metals and organic contaminants is an intractable global problem, with cleanup costs running into billions of dollars using current engineering technologies. The availability of alternative, cheap and effective technologies would significantly improve the prospects of cleaning-up metal contaminated sites. Phytoremediation has been proposed as an economical and ‘green’ method of exploiting plants to extract or degrade the contaminants in the soil. To date, the majority of phytoremediation efforts have been directed at leaping the biological, biochemical and agronomic hurdles to deliver a working technology, with scant attention to the economic outlook other than simple estimates of the cost advantages of phytoremediation over other techniques. In this paper we use a deterministic actuarial model to show that uncertainty in project success (the possibility that full clean up may not be realized) may significantly increase the perceived costs of remediation works for decision-makers."" -- Authors' AbstractNon-PRIFPRI1; PBSEPT
A social analysis of the Red de Protección Social (RPS) in Nicaragua
No full textThe Government of Nicaragua‘s program Red de Protección Social (RPS) represents a new approach to providing safety nets for the poorest people in society, a conditional cash-transfer program that has become an important part of poverty alleviation strategy in several countries in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. What is so important about CCTs is that first, they take a systematic approach to assuring a basic income safety net for the poor, rather than relying on more diffuse, indirect process of poverty reduction, e.g. through demand-driven infrastructure programs; and second, they aim to do more than just put short-term cash in people‘s hands—important as this aspect of safety nets is—but also to invest in the long-term human capital of future generations. They achieve this by conditioning cash transfers on participation of households in health and education services, based on the premise that attention to early children health, nutrition and education significantly increases these children‘s chances of climbing out of poverty later in life. In RPS, beneficiaries must attend health education workshops every two months; bring children to prescheduled preventative healthcare appointments and ensure current vaccinations for children between 0-5 years old; ensure an 85 percent school attendance record for children between 7-13, through 4th grade. In return, beneficiaries receive a cash transfer intended for the purchase of food (and improving diet quality); those with eligible school-age children also receive three cash transfers for school attendance, school supplies, and the teacher transfer to be given to the teacherNon-PRIFPRI1PHN
La mujer: la clave de la seguridad alimentaria
No full textEl papel de la mujer en la economía se ha subestimado con frecuencia y su trabajo en la agricultura ha sido invisible por mucho tiempo. Las autoridades normativas, pese a haber en focado los programas de población, salud y nutrición en la mujer dentro de su función reproductiva, la han desatendido como agente de producción. Sin embargo, esa situación está en proceso de cambio....El Instituto Internacional de Investigaciones sobre Políticas Alimentarias (IFPRI) asigna alta prioridad a la investigación destinada a comprender mejor el papel de la mujer en la agricultura y la seguridad alimentaria. El trabajo del IFPRI en ese campo comenzó con una serie de estudios sobre los efectos de la comercialización agrítudios en el ingreso de la mujer, el con sumo de alimentos y la nutrición de la fa milia y del niño. Ahora, por medio de un programa de investigación multinacional de "fortalecimiento de la política alimentaria por medio del análisis intrafamiliar", los investigadores del IFPRI examinan los procesos de adopción de decisiones dentro de la familia para determinar cómo se asignan los recursos en ese medio. Esas investigaciones se hacen con el fin de obtener la información necesaria para el diseño y la ejecución de políticas alimentarias más eficaces teniendo encuenta las diferencias existentes entre el hombre y la mujer en lo que respecta al acceso a los recursos productivos y al control ejercido sobre los mismos, al interés en el desarrollo y la seguridad alimentaria y a la respuesta a los incentivos para el desarrollo..." (Prefacio)Non-PRIFPRI1FCN
Economic incentives and comparative advantage in Indonesian food crop production
No full textIn Indonesia production of food crops grew an impressive 4.3 percent a year between 1978 and 1988, largely as a result of favorable government pricing, research, and investment policies toward rice and other crops. In recent years, however, the high costs of subsidies to the government and the increasing competition for scarce resources among commodities have caused Indonesian policymakers to take a fresh look at these policies in order to determine what is needed in a changing economic environment. What policies should the government pursue for rice and other major food crops? Should the government provide incentives or investments to promote rice as an export crop? What have been the effects of government policies on the international competitiveness of other commodities such as corn or cassava? Is there a continuing role for large input subsidies, or should these subsidies be eliminated? What investments are appropriate in the food crop sector? The report examines trends in the government policies and production of five major food crops (rice, corn, soybeans, sugar, and cassava) in Indonesia; analyzes the effects of government input-output pricing policies on domestic production incentives for these food crops; and assesses their relative comparative advantage under the three trade regimes of import substitution, interregional trade, and export promotion.PRIFPRI
an analysis of rural households in Bangladesh
No full textMicronutrient deficiencies are particularly severe in Bangladesh. Understanding howhousehold income, food prices, parental education and nutritional knowledge, and culturally-based customs and food preferences interact to determine food consumption patterns (particularly for nonstaple foods), and so micronutrient intake, can provide crucial information for designing policies and intervention programs to improve human nutrition. Within the typical dietary patterns of the Bangladeshi survey population, the key food group with respect to micronutrient consumption is vegetables, providing nearly 95 percent of vitamin A intake, 75 percent of vitamin C intake, and 25 percent of iron intake. Vegetables are the least expensive sources of all of these nutrients. Vegetables are sufficiently inexpensive sources of vitamin A and vitamin C that they could provide the RDA within normal dietary patterns and the budgets of low-income groups. There is no corresponding inexpensive source of iron. Programs to educate consumers about the importance of meeting recommended daily allowances of vitamin A and vitamin C and about commonly eaten sources of these nutrients has the potential for improving intake. Because a high proportion of vitamin A and vitamin C intake apparently comes from own-production, extension programs to promote growing specific vitamin A and vitamin C rich foods not only would provide households with a ready supply of these nutrients, but increased production could bring the local price down.Non-PRIFPRI1FCN
