Econometric and simulation analyses indicate that land degradation does not threaten agricultural productivity growth and food security at the global level, but problems exist in some areas. Improving market performance could reduce erosion-induced yield losses to 0.1 percent per year and the...

Land quality and land degradation affect agricultural productivity, but quantifying these relationships has been difficult. Data are limited, and impacts are sensitive to the choices that farmers make. Summarizing new research by economists, soil scientists, and geographers, this report explores...

Widespread malnutrition in developing countries calls for appropriate interventions, presupposing good knowledge about the nutritional impacts of policies. Little previous work has been carried out in this direction. We present a comprehensive analytical framework, which we apply for Malawi....

We assess the relative impacts of receiving cash versus food transfers using a randomized design. Drawing on data collected in eastern Niger, we find that households randomized to receive a food basket experienced larger, positive impact on measures of food consumption and diet quality than...

The Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011 had mixed effects on the poor in developing nations. By some estimates, the Crisis lifted nearly 24 million poor farmers out of poverty; however, it also cast 68 million net food buyers into poverty. In this paper, we analyze the distributional impacts...

The literature on the impacts of biofuels on food prices is characterized by contradictory findings and a wide range of estimates. To bring more clarity to this issue, we review studies on U.S. corn ethanol expansion released between 2008 and 2013. Normalizing corn price impacts by the increase...

This study uses nationally representative data from 360 farm households in Benin to estimate how access to storage technologies and storage losses from insects affects a smallholder African farmer’s decision to hold grain from production, in an environment of high price variability. We find...

This study analyzes the implications of increasing population density in Kenya’s rural areas on smallholder production and commercialization. Using data from five panel surveys on 1,146 small-scale farms over the 1997-2010 period, we use econometric techniques to determine how increasing rural...