The Policy Intelligence Branch – Global Perspectives (PIB-GP) of the FAO Agrifood Economics and Policy (ESA) Division organized a webinar to introduce the new FAO Country Policy Profiles (CPPs) to all colleagues. The event that got nearly 200 participants, was moderated and facilitated by Lan Huong Nguyen, Economist at PIB-GP, and began with introductory keywords by David Laborde, ESA Director, followed by a short CPP promotional video, and explanatory presentations of the CPPs reasoning and functionality by PIB-GP team members, namely, Lorenzo Bellù, Senior Economist and Team Leader, Isabel Parras, Policy and Data Analyst, and Jacopo Di Iorio, Data Scientist and Analyst.

The event greatly benefited from the view and experience of five panelists who have contributed to the development of the CPPs and are a representation of users of the CPPs: Arne Svensson from Sweden’s Food Policy Evaluation team, Mark Fynn, Policy Officer from FAO Regional Office for Africa, Pham Thi Ngoc Linh from the Institute of Policy and Strategy for Agricultural and Rural Development of Viet Nam, Thibaud Meilland, Economist from the MAFAP team at ESA, and Ken Shimizu, FAOR for Nepal.

The CPPs result from arduous and persistent work to materialize an FAO product that is seen as necessary given the latest trends and current realities. Negative agrifood systems outcomes persist – e.g. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 recently pointed out that around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023. The main reasons are outside of agrifood systems: long-term macroeconomic instability and fragility, conflicts and wars, and climate change impacts. There are many reasons, barriers to progress, and pervasive incentives that help to explain why countries have underachieved and why policy recommendations and project implementations have not triggered transformation for the achievement of Agenda 2030. The CPPs aim to contribute to a better diagnosis of issues that perpetuate barriers. By purposely using a multidisciplinary approach – which is synchronized with the forward-looking Future of food and agriculture publication work – the CPPs attempt to deliver a more informed, more accurate diagnosis of a country’s situation, unveiling those barriers to progress and perverse incentives. This is key information to feed into country policy processes such as country strategic foresight exercises, notably concerning the analysis of selected socioeconomic, environmental and agrifood systems’ drivers, the identification of signals of possible futures, difficult barriers to progress, and the investigation of policy responses adopted so far to activate triggers for the transformation. In a simplified manner, this is what the CPP is and delivers:

• Web-based semi-automated country reports that retrieve information on policy environment from the FAO Food and Agriculture Policy Decision Analysis (FAPDA) database.
• It juxtaposes this with relevant country-level multisectoral long-term data trends obtained from other databases (FAOSTAT, World Development Indicators, AQUASTAT, ILOSTAT and UNISTAT, and others) and generates automatized text.
• Finally, it pairs and analyses all of it with overall national realities and specific context to connect the dots, which usually represent difficult political economy challenges to solving trade-offs (e.g. Achieving SDG 2 without breaching the 1.5 °C threshold: A global roadmap).

The CPPs cover more than 170 countries and territories that already have policy information and long-term data trends. Nine pilot already have initial manual inputs: Bangladesh, Brazil, Madagascar, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Viet Nam, Nepal, and Sweden. Thanks to their semi-automated and structured coverage of all the countries, their flexibility and expandability, the content and analysis of the CPPs naturally lend themselves to Common Country Analyses (CCAs), United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Frameworks (UNSDCFs), and Country Programme Frameworks (CPFs).

Lorenzo Bellù concluded the webinar by highlighting that the work has just begun and that the CPPs are a “live” working-progress product that will enrich and be enriched by hopefully all those involved in country policy support and activities, in various ways: through the inclusion of indicators from different FAO teams, projections, and receiving suggestions of manual inputs from country analysts to help in connecting the dots between policies and strategies, data, and specific national context.