“A beacon of hope and relief”. This is how UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the agreement reached yesterday in Istanbul between Russia and Ukraine that paves the way for the export of Ukrainian grain. The two countries signed separate agreements with Turkey and the UN to unblock grain shipments from Ukrainian ports, which are estimated to hold more than 20 million tonnes of grain. The agreement signed today by Ukraine, the Russian Federation & Türkiye under UN auspices opens […]
Security
The rolling crises of the past few years rendered visible so many vital commodities that plenty of us never gave much thought — nickel, silicon chips, lumber. The latest entrant into this camp: Fertilizer. Why it matters: Skyrocketing fertilizer costs — like those made from nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (NPK) — are driving up food prices and, worse, threatening food security around the globe. State of play: Prices for NPK were up 125% in January from a year before, and […]
The potentially disastrous implications of the war in Ukraine for global food security are clear. The equally bleak implications of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report for the resilience of the food system are even starker. Billions of people are on a trajectory towards hunger, poverty, and instability, driven by conflict, COVID-19, climate change, and rising food costs. The world does not need more dire warnings. The burning question is: what are we going to do? In addition […]
Statement by Gilbert F. Houngbo, President of IFAD Rome, 3 March 2022 — At IFAD we are following the situation in Ukraine with a heavy heart. We deplore the loss of life and displacement of populations, and we join the call of the UN Secretary General to end military operations, restore peace and protect human rights. Conflict and hunger are closely intertwined — when one escalates, the other usually follows. As in any crisis, it is the poorest and most […]
Editor’s Note: Agri-Pulse and The Chicago Council on Global Affairs are teaming up to host a monthly column to explore how the U.S. agriculture and food sector can maintain its competitive edge and advance food security in an increasingly integrated and dynamic world. Immediately before COVID brought the world to a standstill, the Native American Agriculture Fund (NAAF) published a report titled “Reimagining Native Food Economies.” While on its face, the report makes the argument for a modern-day intertwined infrastructure […]
What GAO Found Feed the Future (FTF), a U.S. government–wide global food security initiative coordinated by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), collects data to monitor how FTF projects promote agriculture, resilience, and nutrition (see photos). However, USAID and its FTF partner agencies are limited in their ability to use performance data to assess the initiative’s progress because they have not set FTF-wide performance goals and few FTF indicators fully meet two key attributes of successful performance indicators. Specifically, […]