Effective Public Investments to Improve Food Security
With the implementation of the MDGs, the world made great progress towards eliminating hunger. Nevertheless, hunger remains a major challenge for many countries. A report released by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) found that extra USD11 billion will be required to on average per year to achieve SDG2 in time. Donor will have to provide USD 4 billion and the rest USD 7 billion need to come from developing countries.
What is effective and efficient?
The report groups interventions in five broad categories – social safety nets, farm support, rural development, enabling policies and nutrition. The majority of interventions’ and spending samples fall into two of these categories – farm support and rural development. Furthermore, there is extensive research conducted on the impact of social safety nets, while less is done to analyse the effectiveness of interventions aiming at on farm activities and for rural development.
The report analyses 87 cases of agricultural interventions, majority of which focus on Africa and Asia. A third of the cases use direct food security indicator, mostly covering food availability. The remaining cases used a proxy indicator covering food access. Only a low number of cases used direct food security indicator, due to the difficulty associated with gathering household based information on food consumption.
Findings
Almost 70 per cent of the studied interventions reported to have positive impact on food security, only 7 percent were found to have rather negative impact. Researchers found that most of the positively working interventions were tied to the specific context and to other types of interventions. In addition, the study warns of the so called “publication bias” and the predominant publishing of interventions who have positive impact.
The three intervention types that showed the most positive impacts are input subsidy, value chain development & market access and extension services. Input subsidies include provision of inputs such as seeds and fertilizers. The study found out that such interventions work best when they are based on secure access to land, machinery, irrigation and complementary inputs. Input subsidies also have direct positive effect to yields and productivity, but the correlation to food security is not that straight forward. Since value chain interventions are diverse, take place at different stage of the value chain and are often overlapping with other interventions, it is hard to identify the exact impact on food security. Nevertheless, studies show positive impacts of interventions focused on private sector development, market access, organisations and institutions. Extension services focus on providing information and building capacity regarding farming processes and food security. They function best and have most positive impact when implemented strategically to fit the needs of the community.
Recommendations
The authors summarised four recommendations to help future planning:
- Include direct food security indicators into the design, implementation and evaluation of interventions
- Invest in assessments of local contexts
- Improve methodological approaches for evaluating impact of interventions
- When possible, include cost-benefit comparisons of interventions
Links
Efffective Public Investments to Improve Food Security
To read the policy brief in English, please click on the link above.