Resilience

Smallholder farmers across the globe produce over a third of the world’s food supply, yet they receive a disproportionately small share of global climate finance. A 2020 report released by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) shows that less than 2% of international climate finance, amounting to approximately $2 billion, was allocated to smallholder farmers in 2017/2018.

The United Nations recently warned of the risk of famine in Sudan. The war between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces has killed civilians and devastated livelihoods on a massive scale. Around 18 million people are already acutely hungry, including 3.6 million children who are acutely malnourished.

IFPRI Research Fellow Oliver Kiptoo Kirui, who co-authored the recent IFPRI-UNDP Sudan National Household Survey report—conducted in the midst of war—provides insights on the scale of the country’s food emergency.

What’s the food security situation in Sudan?

In October 2023, the Baidoa district of Somalia experienced severe flooding, impacting more than 120,000 people, including nearly 100,000 internally displaced people. In a new IFPRI learning brief, researchers explore how this extreme weather event affected households in the area and how the country’s Ultra-Poor Graduation (UPG) intervention can play an enhanced role in protecting vulnerable populations from future shocks.  

A growing body of evidence now suggests that global warming increases the risk of extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones (Seneviratne et al. 2021), and these shocks often force poor households to consume less or sell valuable assets, worsening their food security and increasing their vulnerability to chronic poverty. These effects can be particularly salient for women, who often have less resources than male family members even within poor households (Fruttero et al. 2023, van Daalen et al.

Strong agricultural cooperatives could be a powerful pathway to protect vulnerable populations from food insecurity caused by shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent paper in Agriculture & Food Security.