What's New

Macroeconomic policies (monetary and fiscal policies, exchange rate policies, and trade policies) can significantly impact agricultural development and food security, and vice versa. This complex relationship is the subject of a new book , Macroeconomics, Agriculture, and Food Security: A Guide to Policy Analysis in Developing Countries , written by IFPRI Visiting Senior Research Fellow Eugenio Diaz-Bonilla.

Since the 2007-2008 global food crisis, foreign land acquisitions, or “land grabs,” have exploded in number. In 2014, Land Matrix estimated that a total of 950 land deals were in effect in various stages throughout the world, often in countries with poor land governance and high levels of food insecurity. While foreign land acquisition does have the potential to increase essential investment into agriculture in poor developing countries, it also poses a risk to local populations, who may face a loss in access to and control over land.

In the 1960s, Ghana was the world’s largest producer of cocoa beans; while the country’s cocoa crop took a hit in the 1980s as a result of rampant bushfires, it has since rebounded and is now the second largest producer of cocoa beans in the world. The majority of the raw beans grown in Ghana are not processed within the country, however, and the government has been putting more emphasis in recent years on promoting industrialization of the domestic cocoa value chain by subsidizing the price paid for beans by local cocoa bean processors.

Earlier this month, Malawi’s government announced a major change to the country’s Farm Input Subsidy Programme (FISP), an 11-year-old program designed to achieve food self-sufficiency and increased incomes for Malawi’s resource-poor farmers. For the 2015-2016 season, a 50kg bag of fertilizer will cost farmers K3500 (approximately USD 6.31), a 600 percent increase from last year’s cost of K500 (USD 0.90).

The following post by IFPRI senior researcher Alejandro Nin Pratt was originally published on ASTI News and Notes .