全球粮食安全与营养论坛 (FSN论坛)

FAO/GIEWS has released the latest issue of the Crop Prospects and Food Situation quarterly report, which highlights that food assistance needs grow as the COVID-19 pandemic hits incomes. Globally, 45 countries, including 34 in Africa, are in need of external assistance for food. The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through the loss of income and jobs related to containment measures, have severely aggravated global food security conditions, as well as increasing the number of people in need of assistance. Conflicts and weather shocks remained critical factors affecting the current high levels of severe food insecurity.

HIGHLIGHTS

Africa

Larger harvests are estimated in Southern Africa and East Africa, despite floods and outbreaks of desert locusts; although pest damages have been largely contained, serious concerns remain in some countries. Adverse weather reduced wheat outputs in North African countries, while cereal production in West Africa is foreseen at a slightly above-average level. Protracted conflicts continue to limit growth in agricultural production in Central Africa.

Asia

Widespread floods caused damage in several countries in Far East Asia, but rains across the subregion were also beneficial for paddy production and the output in 2020 is forecast at a record high. In the Near East, reflecting improved security conditions and favourable weather, production upturns were estimated in the Syrian Arab Republic and Iraq in 2020. Rainfall shortages generally kept wheat outputs in CIS countries at below-average levels, but barley production increased driven by larger plantings.

Latin America and the Caribbean

In South America, cereal production is forecast to reach a new record high in 2020 underpinned by large maize plantings in Brazil and Argentina, as weak currencies boosted export demand and incentivized farmers. In Central America and the Caribbean, overall favourable weather conditions supported good yields, and cereal production in 2020 is expected at a slightly above-average level.

Please download the full report here: http://www.fao.org/3/cb1101en/CB1101EN.pdf

The FAO Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA) is pleased to invite you to the webinar "Behind the scenes of a global poverty number and the challenges of rural estimates"

Wednesday, June 17 |15:00-16:30|

Please register here. You will receive an e-mail with the link to webinar

The first target of the SDGs is to eradicate extreme poverty, currently measured as people living on less than $1.90 a day. The World Bank estimated that, in 2015, 734 million people lived in extreme poverty worldwide and, of these, about 80 percent lived in rural areas. Not surprisingly, the share of rural inhabitants in developing countries that live in extreme poverty is almost three times higher than the share of those living in urban areas.  What is behind the estimation of these apparently straightforward numbers? How are the figures related to rural poverty calculated? And what could be improved?

In this webinar, R. Andrés Castañeda Aguilar will explain how the World Bank estimates global poverty, highlighting the main methodological challenges of using the current approach for rural areas. Finally, he will discuss potential ways to improve global rural poverty estimates, using an example from Latin America to illustrate their implications.

This webinar looks in greater detail into some of the issues introduced during the last Think-PA webinar on “Estimating the impact of COVID-19 on rural poverty” (watch the video recording here), with a more systematic focus on the methodological challenges to estimating global rural poverty.

Agenda:

• Introduction by Katia Covarrubias, Economist, FAO
• Presentation by R. Andrés Castañeda Aguilar, Economist/Data Scientist, World Bank
• Comment by José Rosero Moncayo, Director of the FAO Statistics Division
• Open discussion

Guest speakers’ bio:

Raul Andrés Castañeda Aguilar is an Economist/Data Scientist in the Data Group of the Department of Development Economics at the World Bank, where, during the last ten years, he has conducted socioeconomic analysis in topics related to poverty, welfare distribution, and inequality of opportunities. He is interested in the analysis of data for policy dialog, statistical and methodological research, and the development of computational tools for socioeconomic analysis. He holds a Master of Science in Economics from the University of Rosario, Colombia and a Master of Arts in Apologetics from the Biola University, USA.

For more information on the Think-PA please click here

To join the Think-PA, please send an e-mail to [email protected]

4 June, 15:00 - 16:15 CEST 

In the context of the gLOCAL week, the evaluation offices of  FAO, IFAD and WFP with the support of EvalForward are organizing an online learning event on innovative methods and approaches in evaluation, and on how innovations can provide lessons for progress under SDG2 “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”.



During the event participants will be able to join one of the below parallel sessions and discuss with their peers. Main takeaways from the sessions will be shared with the plenary.

Key note by Masahiro Igarashi

Director of FAO Office of Evaluation and Chair of the United Nations Evaluation Group (UNEG)

Parallel sessions:

1. Innovative approaches and tools for evaluation. 

This session will discuss approaches that evaluation can adopt in times of crisis and present practical methods and tools such as remote sensing and synthesis, and more.

Speakers: Hansdeep Khaira (IFAD) and Carlos Tarazona (FAO)



2. Learning from experience: Community-driven development approaches and innovations.

This session will illustrate how evaluations contribute to knowledge and learning, using the cases of the evaluation synthesis on community-driven development (CDD) approaches and  the corporate-level evaluation on innovations in IFAD.

Speakers: Johanna Pennarz (IFAD) and Maximin Kouessi Kodjio (IFAD) 



3. Going visual in a virtual world: how visualization is bringing greater engagement to evaluation discussions.

Recent experiences in using visual tools for presenting and discussing evaluation work that can be also used in virtual settings will be presented, with examples from Bangladesh, Laos and Myanmar.

Speakers: Yumiko Kanemitsu (WFP) and Keisuke Taketani (facilitation and visualisation expert)

Register for the event here: https://fao.zoom.us/j/97262395101

Following the event, participants will receive all material being discussed and shared.

FAO has implemented an array of tools to support policy analyses and assess the impact of COVID-19 on on food and agriculture, value chains, food prices, food security across the globe.

• Urgent policy measures
• Policy briefs
• Policy responses
• Big data | Daily updates
• Food policy warnings
• Crop calendars

Strengthening food production and distribution systems is key to fighting hunger and entails helping tackle diseases wherever they emerge in humans, animals, plants or the environment. The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global health crisis, and FAO is playing a role in assessing and responding to its potential impacts on people’s life and livelihoods, global food trade, markets, food supply chains and livestock. FAO believes this will allow countries to anticipate and mitigate possible disruptions the pandemic may trigger for people’s food security and livelihoods, avoiding panic-driven reactions that can aggravate disruptions and deteriorate the food and nutrition security of the most vulnerable.FAO is working closely with WHO, WFP, IFAD and OIE and other partners, harnessing broad networks to drive further research, support ongoing investigations and share critical knowledge.

Tuesday, 24 March - 14:00 - 15:30 CET

Even though there is a large consensus that it is an individual condition, poverty is usually measured using household aggregated data. At the same time, social policies in developing countries, including food security and nutrition interventions, often try to reach deprived individuals by targeting poor households. However, differently from what standard poverty measures assume, there is often substantial inequality in the distribution of resources within households. The consequence is that poverty reduction policies might be fail to identify the households where most deprived individuals live and/orreach those deprived individuals 

within their households.

In this webinar, Caitlin Brown will address the issue of intra-household inequality in the context of poverty measurement. She will discuss the challenges of identifying intra-household inequality as well as the consequences that accounting for it might have on current poverty numbers. Her presentation will provide an overview of the existing empirical evidence on intra-household inequality in nutritional outcomes, caloric intake, resource shares as well as discrimination against certain household members.  Finally, it will analyse the implications for targeting rural poverty reduction policies.

Agenda:

• Introduction by Erdgin Mane, Policy Officer, FAO
• Presentation by Caitlin Brown, Assistant Professor, Central European University
• Open Discussion

To take part register here

To join the Think-PA, please send an e-mail to: [email protected].

Organized by the Technical Network on Poverty Analysis (Think-PA) 

New emission statistics provide data on the greenhouse gas emissions shares of agriculture and related land use in total emissions from all economic sectors, for all countries and for the period 1990-2017.