This discussion paper is the first in a series of papers prepared as part of IFPRI's 2020 Vision initiative, which seeks to develop an international consensus on how to meet future world food needs while reducing poverty and protecting the environment. It shows that poverty and environmental...

Poverty is a significant and persistent problem in developing countries. Over 1.1 billion people live in households that earn a dollar a day or less per person. Almost half of the population of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa lives in absolute poverty; only East Asia has managed to...

Russia's food economy is undergoing a fundamental transition. Rapid changes and adjustments are still taking place in the market and pricing systems, in the subsidies to output and input markets and the credit market, and in the process of privatization and other structural reforms. These...

Farming is a threat to the natural environment in rich as well as poor countries, but the human stakes are now much higher in the developing world, where food needs are acute and growing rapidly. Roughly 700 million people in developing countries do not have access to sufficient food supplies to...

The future of China's grain economy has been the subject of much debate. Some observers predict rapidly increasing grain imports that will strain the world's productive capacity. Most of China's own economists disagree: researchers in the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences have long...

The condition of the world's natural resource base in the year 2020 largely depends on whether poverty has been eradicated. Poverty and environmental degradation are closely linked, often in a self-perpetuating negative spiral in which poverty accelerates environmental degradation and...

Employment programs, particularly labor-intensive public works (LIPW), have a long history in Sub-Saharan Africa, dating back to the 1960s. The programs expanded rapidly in the 1980s and early 1990s, especially in countries that experienced sharp declines in employment and real wages....

The world's population, today numbering some 5.5 billion people, may approach 12 billion by the end of the next century. By the year 2020, 26 years from today, it will most likely have increased by about 2.5 billion to a total of 8 billion people, an increase of nearly 100 million a year. Over...

Future directions of food supply and demand will be determined by the interaction of various market forces (such as prices, population, and income) as they will be affected by decisions and policies of farmers, national governments, and international donors. Considering all these factors, an...