What's New

In the face of price spikes, climate change, and other stressors from the national to the global scale, the promotion of resilience has gained traction in the development community as a means of insuring that populations vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity are equipped with the tools to survive and even thrive in our unpredictable world.

The year 2015 saw the world’s focus transition from the Millennium Development Goals to the Sustainable Development Goals. According to a new World Bank report , the year is also predicted to see a significant drop in extreme poverty (defined as living with less than $1.90 per day according to the updated international poverty line), from 902 million people worldwide in 2012 to 702 million people in 2015, or 9.6 percent of the global population. This marks the first time that the percentage of global extreme poverty will fall to single-digit levels.

In the inter-connected world of food security, partnerships – among countries, regions, and development organizations – can play a critical role in achieving research- and evidence-based policies to increase the resilience of global food systems and to improve food and nutrition security for all. In this light, since 2014, IFPRI has held a series of food policy dialogues in Africa south of the Sahara, in collaboration with various regional partners as part of the Food Security Portal project.

The African Union’s Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme, or CAADP, has made steady progress over its past 10 years of implementation. However, the African continent continues to face some key challenges, including the need to provide for the food and nutrition needs of a steadily growing population, economic inequality and rural poverty, disputes over limited natural resources, and the impact of climate change and market globalization.

The HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to plague the African continent, causing widespread human suffering and creating a stumbling block to economic development. In SSA, over a million people become newly infected with the disease every year ( UNAIDS, 2010 ). While access to proper medical care and education about safe sexual practices clearly play a role in preventing further spread of and deaths from the HIV virus, a new paper in The Economic Journal suggests that protecting people’s incomes could help decrease the spread of the disease as well.