What's New

The current El Niño phenomenon is expected to result in rainfall deficits and below-average harvests throughout Southern Africa in 2024, according to a recent alert from FEWS Net. Poor households throughout the region will likely face reduction in livelihoods and income and difficulty purchasing adequate food.

A caricature of the situation in climate finance, particularly regarding Africa, is a classic vicious circle: Climate finance is not flowing because of the lack of bankable investment plans; the lack of investment plans is due to a lack of faith that climate finance will flow.

The CGIAR Initiative on National Policies and Strategies Nigeria has released the new Nigeria Food Security Simulator. This Excel-based tool allows users to estimate short-term impacts of household-level income or food price shocks and related policy decisions on diets and food security in the country.

An estimated 23 percent of Nigeria’s GDP comes from agriculture, and as many as 70 percent of the nation’s labor force engages in the agricultural sector. At the same time, approximately 40 percent of Nigerians face poverty and food insecurity, driven in part by low agricultural productivity and low levels of technology adoption. With climate shocks expected to become more frequent and extreme, these smallholder households will be even more vulnerable to reduced agricultural productivity, loss of incomes and livelihoods, and food and nutrition insecurity.

Nearly US$ 4 trillion: That is the amount of global crop and livestock production the FAO estimates has been lost over the past three decades due to disaster events. According to the new report, “The impact of disasters on agriculture and food security,” this equates to an average loss of US$123 billion per year and as much as 5 percent of annual global agricultural GDP.