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Food security: what lessons learned?
Photo: Farmers working in rice field, Bandung, Indonesia (Jisse Kranen 2009)
As food prices nearly doubled from 2006 to 2008, the number of people suffering from hunger soared, as witnessed by the current food crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region. By 2009 the world was suddenly confronted with the record number of one billion undernourished.
After two decades of gradual neglect of the issue, and a steady drop in investment agriculture, there is now a renewed interest in food security as one of the key themes in international development co-operation.
Improving food security - A systematic review of the impact of interventions in agricultural production, value chains, market regulation, and land security: This systematic review by the Netherlands used information from 38 selected case studies and 46 other reviews to evaluate the impact of interventions aimed at increasing production, developing value chains, reforming market regulation, and improving land tenure security, on food security.
Agricultural input subsidies in Sub-Saharan Africa: This study by Denmark provides an assessment of the overall performance of agricultural input subsidy programmes in Malawi, Zambia, Ghana and Tanzania, where so-called “smart” subsidies have been introduced in an attempt to maximise effects at the lowest possible costs.
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In January 2012 the DAC Evaluation Network published an Evaluation Insights on Improving Food Security. This note summarises findings from a systematic review which focused on the impacts of programmes aimed at increasing food production, developing value chains for food products, reforming markets and improving land security.Some of the emerging findings include:
- Genetic crop improvement and interventions reducing production losses have shown convincing results
- The reduction of trade barriers combined with the abrupt abandonment of government support to the agricultural sector discouraged domestic food production in several African countries
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More evaluation reports on food security
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