Andrea Cattaneo is a Senior Economist at FAO, leading the team that produces The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), which is FAO’s flagship publication. He has over 25 years of experience in examining economic issues relating to development, food security, and climate change. In recent years his focus has been on migration, resilience of agrifood systems, and the role of rural-urban linkages in rural transformation. The 2023 SOFA report focuses on revealing the true cost of food to transform agrifood systems. His research is guided by strategic considerations on obtaining concrete action, filling policy-relevant information gaps, improving policies, and developing innovative investment options for agricultural development and food security.
Andrea Cattaneo
Dear all,
Thank you again to all the contributors for the valuable input. The feedback received is clearly based on a wealth of experiences that contributors have gathered around the world, providing different perspectives on the theme of migration, agriculture, and rural development.
Some of the issues raised are very much in line with FAO’s approach to rural development as a way of providing a choice to people living in rural areas, on whether to migrate or not. This year’s State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), launched on October 9th, focused on territorial approaches to rural development, and the role of the food system in lifting people out of poverty in rural areas. Based on contributors’ comments, for SOFA 2018 we will try to build on this territorial approach and link it more directly to the drivers and impacts of rural migration. Another aspect that emerged from the discussion is the role of urban areas in providing employment, services and amenities. The report will try to capture the differentials between rural and urban areas as drivers of migration and policy implications.
We also received contributions highlighting work of which we were not aware, or pointing in directions that we had not considered. For example, the issue of migrant fishers is one that was not part of our initial outline, but one that we believe should be included. Another aspect to be considered is the health and nutritional status of both migrants and those left behind.
In the coming months we will be collecting further information and produce a report that is evidence-based, and hopefully provide new policy-relevant insights on the topic. Thank you to all of you for indicating ongoing empirical work of relevance to the publication, and the broader literature on migration dynamics, demography, and gender-related migration issues. The dialogue and input provided was very helpful in providing guidance to our team. I particularly appreciated the time taken by contributors on how to improve the report structure and provide a clearer rationale for the document.
The 2018 edition of the State of Food and Agriculture is scheduled to be launched in mid-September 2018. This leaves only a few months to prepare the report since we have to allow time for translation in the other 5 official UN languages and for the production process. In the coming days we will be receiving commissioned background papers on country case studies that we hope will enrich the report with different regional perspectives. We will also be incorporating your suggestions on the outline and exploring some of the information resources that emerged in the forum.
A big thank you to all who participated in this Forum!
Andrea
Andrea Cattaneo
Dear all,
I want to thank again the contributors who have continued to ensure a lively and interesting discussion as well as really useful and important comments and suggestions. A special thank you to those of you who have suggested specific cases and sources of information. Please keep it up.
I would also like to recognize the many suggestions for improvements to the contents that have continued to arrive. Let me just mention suggestions to look at conditions of migrants in locations of both origin and destination and to consider both the positive dimensions of migration and the risks involved. The suggestion to look more carefully at innovation and migration, especially in relation to youth, is also an interesting one. I have also taken note of the call to go beyond the push-pull framework and bring in additional elements from the demographic literature as well as de-emphasizing the rural-urban dichotomy and rather considering the rural-urban continuum.
I look forward to a continued interesting discussion during the last days of this online consultation.
Andrea
Andrea Cattaneo
Dear all,
I want to thank all the contributors for the thoughtful and constructive interventions so far. They will certainly be of great help to us in preparing a better report.
It is difficult to summarize and cover the richness and variety of the interventions received. I would like to just mention a few significant areas. Several contributions highlight the challenges involved in defining and empirically assessing rural migration due to heterogeneity in definitions and measurements. Others highlight the complexity of impacts of migration both on rural labour markets and livelihoods. Important insights were also presented concerning the challenge of structural transformation, in particular in relation to dwindling farm sizes and poor agricultural labour productivity resulting from demographic pressures in rural areas. Gender issues were also prominent, as well as reminders to go beyond mere economic impacts of migration and include broader social impacts.
I would also like to thank those who have made specific suggestions for improvements to the contents and outline of our report, as well as those who have provided specific references to literature and ongoing work or concrete country examples from your own experience examples. We are very much interested in concrete country cases, and I would like to encourage further contributions in this direction.
I look forward to the continuation of an interesting discussion.
Andrea