Political Science > Agriculture & Food Policy
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 157 items
Despite having contributed minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions, Chad is highly vulnerable to climate change, which is already affecting the country. With most people depending on agriculture and livestock, urgent adaptation measures are needed to build resilience. Additionally, Chad’s reliance on oil for revenue and exports means global mitigation efforts will require a push toward economic diversification and a shift to a low-carbon economy. Given limited fiscal space and high reform costs, pragmatic short-term prioritization, search for synergies, and increased financing from domestic, international, and private sources are essential. Strengthened and better targeting social protection will help safeguard the most vulnerable.
Abstract: Sierra Leone is among the most vulnerable countries in the world to the hazards of climate change. The interlinkages between climate shocks, elevated levels of poverty and food insecurity, and high dependency on rain fed agriculture suggest that climate strategies will need to be integrated with the social protection framework. Our simulations suggest that while a strategy of cash transfers to affected households, external trade liberalization or lowering the cost of mobility are good standalone policy responses to food insecurity, a combination of all three as a package is likely to be most effective.
During the global recession of 2020 food insecurity increased substantially in many countries around the world. Fortunately, the surge in food insecurity quickly came to a halt as the world economy returned to its positive growth path, despite double-digit domestic food inflation in most countries. To shed light on the relative importance of income growth and food inflation in driving food insecurity, we employ a heterogeneous-agent model with income inequality, complemented by novel cross-country data for the period 2001-2021. We use external instruments (changes in commodity terms-of-trade, external economic growth, and harvest shocks) to isolate exogenous variation in domestic income growth and ood inflation. Our findings suggest that income growth is the dominant driver of annual variations in food insecurity, while food price inflation plays a somewhat smaller role, aligning with our model predictions.