PREFACE

FAO publishes an edition of Current and Emerging Issues for Economic Analysis and Policy Research (CUREMIS) on a bi-annual basis. This CUREMIS project was created in response to the recommendations of a High Level Panel of external experts invited by the Director-General of FAO to provide suggestions on the future orientation of FAO’s analytical work on economic and policy aspects of food and agriculture. The panel recommended that the research priorities of the Agriculture and Economic Development Analysis Division (ESA) should be directed at the systematic identification of major current and emerging issues for policy and economic analysis and of gaps in the state of knowledge regarding those issues. The panel also recommended that the process of identification and prioritization of issues draw on the rich experience and work at the country and regional levels of the decentralized policy assistance capacities of FAO and, more generally, on the presence of the Organization in countries and regions.

The general purpose of CUREMIS is thus the identification of important issues related to food and agriculture (including rural poverty, food security, gender and environmental/natural resource issues) and carry out an in-depth analysis of those issues. The objective of such analyses is to identify gaps in knowledge on those issues and propose those gaps for further analysis to the research, academic and development communities. The ultimate objective of the overall effort is to improve the information and knowledge base required for designing policy options. FAO is in a unique position to undertake such an exercise due to the Organization’s multidisciplinarity, its vast experience in food and agricultural issues and its continuous contacts, through its decentralized offices, with policy-making circles in developing countries.

The first edition, published in 2001, covered global issues, including new trends in development thinking; rural poverty in Latin America; institutions, reform and agricultural performance and migration. The 2003 edition, or CUREMIS-II, covers issues with a regional focus. This second edition, of which the current volume on Latin America and the Caribbean forms part, is comprised of five separately published volumes, covering also the regions of Asia and the Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

The identification of the issues for each region has been the result of a process of consultations involving headquarters staff and staff from the regional and subregional offices. The detailed annotated outlines of the papers included in each volume were discussed in regional workshops in which FAO staff, members of the research, academic and policy communities from the region participated. It is our hope that the CUREMIS project can make a substantial contribution to the identification of research priorities relevant to development policy, but also that it contributes to the ongoing debate on the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, including the goal set by the World Food Summit to halve the number of hungry people by 2015.