Food Security Policy Evaluation And Impact Assessment

This book offers an essential, comprehensive, yet accessible reference of contemporary food security discourse and guides readers through the steps required for food security analysis. Food insecurity is a major obstacle to development and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is a complex issue that cuts across traditional sectors in government and disciplines in academia. Understanding how multiple elements cause and influence food security is essential for policymakers, practitioners and scholars. This book demonstrates how evaluation can integrate the four elements of food security (availability, access, nutrition and resilience) and offers practical tools for policy and programme impact assessment to support evidence-based planning. Aimed at researchers, postgraduates and those undertaking professional development in food studies, agricultural economics, rural development, nutrition and public health, the book is key reading for those seeking to understand evidence-based food security analysis.

Assessing impacts of public investments has long captured the interest and attention of the development community. This paper presents the evolution of different methods and approaches used for ex ante appraisal, monitoring, project evaluation, and impact assessment over the last five decades. Among these tools, impact assessment (IA) conducted retrospectively comes closest to providing the proof of development effectiveness. It is defined as the systematic analysis of the significant or lasting changes in people's lives brought about by a given action or series of actions in relation to a counterfactual. There are three basic types of retrospective IAs: macro-level IAs that focus on the contribution of developmental efforts to an impact goal aggregated at a sector or a system level; micro-level impact evaluations (IEs) concerned with estimating the average effect of an intervention on outcomes at the beneficiary level; and micro-level ex post impact analysis concerned with total effects of a development effort after the outputs are scaled-up. Ex post IAs have evolved and expanded over the decades in both breadth and depth of analysis in response to evolving development themes and methodological advancements. The increased emphasis on learning from evaluations has also seen responses from both quantitative and qualitative camps of the evaluation community. The paper argues that generation of robust knowledge that feeds into making developmental policies and investment decisions requires a hierarchical and cumulative approach to "improving the proof" through rigorous and a variety of impact assessment methods applied incrementally at the project, program and system level. Subjecting as many development interventions as resources allow to rigorous impact assessment based on a common framework can help build a critical body of evidence on impacts of development interventions, which can then be subjected to meta-analyses to help assimilate results across different studies and build a knowledge base on what works and what does not.

This book offers an essential, comprehensive, yet accessible reference of contemporary food security discourse and guides readers through the steps required for food security analysis. Food insecurity is a major obstacle to development and achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is a complex issue that cuts across traditional sectors in government and disciplines in academia. Understanding how multiple elements cause and influence food security is essential for policymakers, practitioners and scholars. This book demonstrates how evaluation can integrate the four elements of food security (availability, access, nutrition and resilience) and offers practical tools for policy and programme impact assessment to support evidence-based planning. Aimed at researchers, postgraduates and those undertaking professional development in food studies, agricultural economics, rural development, nutrition and public health, the book is key reading for those seeking to understand evidence-based food security analysis.

Food Security, Poverty and Nutrition Analysis provides essential insights into the evaluative techniques necessary for creating appropriate and effective policies and programs to address these worldwide issues. Food scientists and nutritionists will use this important information, presented in a conceptual framework and through case studies for exploring representative problems, identifying and implementing appropriate methods of measurement and analysis, understanding examples of policy applications, and gaining valuable insight into the multidisciplinary requirements of successful implementation. This book provides core information in a format that provides not only the concept behind the method, but real-world applications giving the reader valuable, practical knowledge. * Identify proper analysis method, apply to available data, develop appropriate policy * Demonstrates analytical techniques using real-world scenario application to illustrate approaches for accurate evaluation improving understanding of practical application development * Tests reader comprehension of the statistical and analytical understanding vital to the creation of solutions for food insecurity, malnutrition and poverty-related nutrition issues using hands-on exercises

The IFPRI 2020 Conference on “Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health” was held in New Delhi, India, February 10–12, 2011, and attracted more than 900 attendees. Conference activities included 12 plenary sessions, 15 parallel sessions, 14 side events, an ongoing knowledge fair with more than 25 exhibit booths and tables, six informal discussion groups, and roughly 30 “rapid fire” presentations during coffee breaks. Assessing the impact of this Conference is a task complicated by multiple issues such as assessment coverage and impact attribution. The assessment methods used here include surveys of conferees, Internet searches, website and literature searches, and extensive personal interviews. Distinctions are drawn between short-term and medium-term impacts, and also among impacts on individuals, on institutions, and on professional discourse. Impacts on individual conferees were measured through pre- and post-Conference surveys and telephone interviews. The impacts on the substantive views of those who attended the Conference were found to be small. Most conferees (75 percent) came to Delhi already convinced that a cross-sector approach to agriculture, nutrition, and health (ANH) was appropriate. At the individual level, the Conference impacted motivation and empowerment more than beliefs. The Conference gave those who attended new information, new networking opportunities, and various “positioning advantages” that made them more effective within their own institutions back home. Such advantages were primarily important in the short term. Regarding impacts on institutions, the 2020 Conference produced important but mixed results. Direct impacts on national governments were small, in part because ministerial structures and bureaucratic routines in governments are traditionally segregated by sector, and resistant to anything more than incremental change. Direct impacts from the 2020 Conference on private companies and NGOs were also modest, but for a different reason: these institutions are inherently comfortable working across sectors, so most of the private companies and NGOs participating in the Conference felt little need to change. The strongest institutional impacts from the Conference came within a category of organizations that wanted to integrate nutrition with agriculture, but were unsure of how, or how quickly, to move forward. These institutions included the CGIAR itself as it moved to create the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (CRP4); the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as it responded to an internal evaluation of its own work in nutrition; and a number of donor institutions including most prominently the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID), which used the materials and policy energy generated by the 2020 Conference to help guide and push a major expansion of bilateral funding into the ANH arena. These DFID responses alone were a large enough payoff to mark the Conference a success. A third significant impact from the Conference was on professional discourse. The 2020 Conference helped change the conversation about agriculture and food security by boosting the frequency of reference to cross-sector impacts on both nutrition and health. Impact measurement becomes difficult here, because the Conference was not the only initiative highlighting cross-sector linkages underway. Nonetheless, the average number of Google Internet hits per search for the phrase “linking agriculture, nutrition, and health” increased from 9,288 in the pre-Conference period to 13,508 in the immediate post-Conference period of March–May 2011. Searches of organization websites revealed that 18 of 21 of the sites had more links to agriculture, nutrition, and health issues immediately following the Conference compared to just before, and 20 of 21 had an even higher number of such links one year later in July 2012. The most obvious limitation on impact has been at the level of national government policy (excluding donor policies). Partly this reflects attendance. Only 19 percent of those who attended the 2020 Conference were government officials, compared to 41 percent who came from research institutes or universities. Yet, even where Conference impacts on governments might have seemed probable, they have proved (so far) to be mostly tentative or modest. The government of Malawi co-hosted its own version of the 2020 Conference in Lilongwe in September 2011. While this was an important step, the Conference was donor-suggested and donor-funded, and senior officials from the Ministry of Health were unable to attend.In Uganda, the 2020 Conference helped sustain an effort to mainstream nutrition within the Ministry of Agriculture. However, this effort was underway before the Conference, and parallel efforts from USAID, WFP, and FAO did as much to sustain it.In China, the leadership of the State Food and Nutrition Consultation Committee was briefed on 2020 Conference materials, which may have helped to establish a new (but already approved) food safety and nutrition development institute at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Since Chinese leaders had been unable to attend the Conference itself, impacts in the country also depended heavily on a separate outreach effort by IFPRI leadership.In India, national officials and researchers—and IFPRI—made concerted efforts to use the Conference to shape language in the new 12th Five-Year Plan (2012–16). While some engaged in this effort claimed progress in that direction, nothing definitive has emerged and in India it appears that little has changed in the traditional separation between the agriculture ministry and the nutrition and health sectors. The Conference’s largest impacts within India were felt at the individual level, at the level of discourse, or within some state administrations, not within national governmental institutions. What can one reasonably expect when looking for impacts from a single international Conference? In the case of the 2020 Conference in Delhi, where the goal was to change the way individuals and institutions were thinking about ANH issues and considering them in professional discourse, measurable progress was made toward each of these goals in both the short term and the medium term. IFPRI took a risk by designing the Delhi Conference to challenge traditional paradigms. This assessment shows that, in both the short term and medium term, the risk has been rewarded.

The Handbook on Public Policy and Food Security provides multi-disciplinary insight into food security analysis across the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As food security is an essential outcome and a part of sustainable and healthy food systems, this Handbook addresses the urgent need to provide a comprehensive overview of the field’s current developments.

"This report assesses the impact of IFPRI's work on the agriculture negotiations in the WTO's Doha Round. It is set against the context of IFPRI's mission which emphasizes food security and the interests of poor people in low-income countries and underlines the importance of active engagement in policy communications to link research work to policy action. The report also traces briefly the evolution of IFPRI's work on international agricultural trade more generally, noting its broad disposition to market-oriented policy prescriptions while illuminating the very different impacts of agricultural trade liberalization on individual developing countries through detailed research at the national and household level." -- from Author's Abstract

The marketing and policy research on rice of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is described, and the conclusions and recommendations are discussed in the context of the decisionmaking processes in Viet Nam. The role of IFPRI's publication and communications in informing the policy environment are discussed. The author describes the perceptions of partners and stakeholders of the influence of the outcomes of the IFPRI project. They show that the research was regarded as being of high quality, independent, rigorous, and timely. A strong foundation of primary and secondary data gathering and analysis from Viet Nam gave the modeling work on policy options a high degree of credibility among key policymakers. Linking the spatial equilibrium model with income distribution analysis based on national household surveys allowed IFPRI to satisfy policymakers that relaxing rice export quotas and internal trade restrictions on rice would not adversely impact on regional disparities and food security and would have beneficial effects on farm pricesand poverty, giving a degree of confidence to policymakers that relaxing the controls would be in Viet Nam's national interest. They made these decisions earlier than would have been the case without the IFPRI research. A framework for the evaluation of policy research and advice is described, which explicitly recognizes the possibility of alternative suppliers of these two components to IFPRI. The framework is used to assess the impact of IFPRI's research with Viet Nam on alternative internal and external trade policies for rice in that country. The policy assessment framework is used to measure the economic impact of the policy changes, and the contribution of IFPRI's work with Viet Nam on the policies from 1995–97. Around 40 percent of the contribution of IFPRI is estimated to have accrued to the rest of the world as Viet Nam is now a major player in world rice trade.