The note analyses key features of the interplay between trade and gender equality in agriculture exploring gender dynamics in agrifood value chains and their implications for developing countries, with a focus on the dimensions of employment, market participation and entrepreneurship. Globally, gender inequalities constrain women’s access to agrifood markets and have an impact on agricultural value chain development, trade performance and economic growth. Agrifood trade can lead to social and...

This technical note explores the impact of trade on nutrition, addressing the role of trade in the “nutrition transition” and the extent to which trade policies affect nutritional objectives.

This technical note describes a novel approach to measuring changes in the affordability of nutritious diets in low-income settings, using price indexes to monitor how trade policy or market infrastructure and other factors influence the cost of reaching a standard threshold of dietary diversity. We provide preliminary results for a new Cost of Diet Diversity (CoDD) price index in Ghana, contrasted with existing Cost of Nutrient Adequacy indexes as well...

This note provides a structured review of adoption trends of national policies aimed at promoting healthier diets and collates evidence on their effectiveness. We limit our focus to evidence exploiting data collected after the policy implementation, and using appropriate counterfactual methods to identify the policy effect.

Traditionally, agricultural, trade and food policies have rarely been shaped by their anticipated dietary and nutritional impacts. Yet, such policy choices have potentially important consequences for the diets and nutrition of populations.This note presents an overview of dietary implications of agri-food policies not explicitly targeted at nutrition.

The objective in this technical note is to look at transnational corporations in the food industries and study the conceptual issues in trying to assess causation for diet change and to examine the (limited) empirical evidence supporting alternative views.

This technical note revisits the analysis presented in Technical Note No. 9, updating data used in the identification of Import Surges to 2013 to capture recent changes in the global market context of higher and more volatile food prices and significant increases in volumes of imports to food deficit developing countries.

Many developing countries are currently under pressure to reduce their trade barriers to the entry of agricultural products. This pressure comes both as a result of ongoing trade negotiations (multilateral, plurilateral or bilateral) and due to policy advice from donors and international organizations based on the assumption that a liberal agricultural trade policy is necessary to allow growth through trade expansion. Although developing countries are very heterogeneous both in terms...

There has been a recent proliferation of simulation modelling exercises attempting to quantify the potential economic gains from further liberalization of agricultural trade, and in doing so, seeking to inform the current Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations. This paper seeks to contribute to a better appreciation of what the results of simulation models actually mean, and the extent to which they can be used to inform debates relating to...

2004 was declared the International Year of Rice by the United Nations General Assembly, a tribute to a commodity that is the staple food for about half of the world’s population and also a major income earner in developing countries. Because of its strategic importance, rice has been subject to a host of policy interventions that have made it feature among the most distorted of all agricultural commodities. For this...