Making it Right: Greening Agricultural Policies

The project will develop and pilot an innovative approach to help countries to transform their rural areas and the agricultural sector effectively, thereby reducing food insecurity and poverty while promoting economic growth and environmental preservation. The empirical strategy will combine an economy-wide model and territorial approach to prioritize sectors and public investments, policy review, economic modelling, commodity prioritization, environmental impact evaluation and identification of key policy reform options.

Based on economy-wide model, the subprogramme will rank sectors (e.g. crops/commodities/group of commodities) based on their simulated potential benefits for a given amount of investment. This will serve to identify the sectors where public expenditure and investments are expected to be most cost-effective in terms of their impacts on inclusive agricultural transformation dimensions (e.g. ag GDP, employment, poverty reduction, affordability of healthy diets). The modelling results will be further analyzed using a territorial approach to prioritizing public investments. Additionally, the project will involve many in-depth roundtable discussions with the governments and other stakeholders to identify feasible policy interventions and investments at the value chain level that stimulate economic growth, while preserving the environment and leaving no one behind. This work will contribute to a broad mandate of enabling sustainable transformation of the agrifood sector and improving environmental outcomes while reducing food insecurity and poverty at the same time.

Bangladesh and Ghana are the subprogramme's target countries. Through this subprogramme, policy makers and other stakeholders will have access to comprehensive and quality information that will support evidence-based decision-making processes. The subprogramme foresees capacity building activities that will transfer the knowledge and the technical skills to ensure continuation of evidence-based decision-making approach in the future, while enabling proper monitoring and evaluation of policy reforms.

The sub-programme will serve as a pilot to be subsequently replicated in other countries.