In addition to global developments and food policy changes, 2014 also saw important developments with potentially wide repercussions in individual countries and regions. This chapter offers perspectives on major food policy developments in various regions including Africa, the Middle East and...

Food security in Asia and the Pacific presents a frustrating paradox. At one level, huge progress has been made in the past half century in bringing most of the population out of poverty and hunger. Measured by the key determinants of food security—improved availability, access, utilisation...

Rice production in Africa has tended to be low-yielding, geographically dispersed, and uncompetitive against low-cost Asian imports, even when protected by high freight costs and substantial trade barriers. Skyrocketing prices in world markets in 2007-08 were a chock to African consumers,...

There has been extremely rapid transformation of the food retail sector in developing regions in the past 5 to10 years, accompanied by a further consolidation and multi-nationalization of the supermarket sector itself. This organizational change, accompanied by intense competition, has driven...

In lieu of abstract (Introduction)--Imagine a region of the world where all food and agricultural products are sourced from international markets, and domestic agricultural sectors have disappeared. This "world without agriculture" is not imaginary. For many of the world's poorest countries,...

Food security is an elusive concept. Many economists doubt that it has any precise meaning at all. Having enough to eat on a regular basis, however, is a powerful human need, and satisfying this need drives household behavior in both private and public markets in predictable ways. Indeed, the...

“Pro-poor growth” is the new mantra of the development community. Most donor agencies have active research programs underway to understand the pro-poor process, and the World Bank, with British, French and German bilateral support, is already studying how to operationalize the concept...

In the long run-- over the past four decades--improvements in food security in Indonesia have generally been driven by pro-poor economic growth and a successful Green Revolution, led by high-yielding rice varieties, massive investments in rural infrastructure, including irrigation, and ready...