The activities which fall under this are those which take a forward-looking approach to changes in global economic and environmental change, and its impacts on food systems and supporting ecosystems. The long-term outlook studies which have been published under the Vision 2020 program, are examples of the activities that fall under this output. All of our current biofuels work, falls under this category, as well as the current projects which look at climate change adaptation. The HarvestChoice project will take into account forward-looking quantification of drivers relevant to a variety of crop production systems, so as to examine the human well-being impacts. All of our recent work on understanding the determinants of high food prices, and future outlooks for market prices, also falls under this. Given the long history of IFPRI in providing forward-looking outlooks for major commodity crops of the CGIAR, and linking them to key issues of socioeconomic and environmental change, the comparative advantage for doing this work lies squarely in the domain of this project team.

Ethiopia, India, Senegal, South Africa

The activities which fall under this are those which build on existing, but often disparate and incompatible databases of bio-physical characteristics relevant to agricultural production (soil, water, topography, climate, etc), as well as socioeconomic data—in order to build a consistent and robust knowledge base upon which the analysis of global economic and environmental change and its impacts on food systems and supporting ecosystems can be evaluated. Many of the activities which fall under the HarvestChoice program undertake this kind of task, and constitute a valuable body of knowledge that will be widely disseminated through web-based interfaces and other appropriate visualization tools. The excellent track record that has been created by IFPRI in providing detailed spatial maps of the global distribution of key commodities, through GIS analysis, is an example of the kinds of knowledge support systems that this project team has comparative advantage in creating.  

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The activities which fall under this take the results that are generated from scenario-based changes in global economic and environmental conditions, and draw specific inferences for policy intervention or technological investment, so that the impacts on the functioning of food systems and human welfare are minimized. All of the recommendations that come from our current biofuels work are of this nature, as well as those which will come from the ongoing projects on climate change adaptation. The project which evaluates policy interventions and investments from a gender perspective will also embody these qualities very strongly, and all of the main conclusions from the HarvestChoice project will also have this dimension. Similarly, our recent work on drivers of high food prices are already generating key policy recommendations and options, and this will continue with other ongoing projects of technology assessment and evaluation of alternative outcomes for food systems. The long-standing nature of IFPRI’s work in providing medium- to long-term outlooks of food system outcomes, and their implications for investment and policy intervention, gives this program a comparative advantage in doing this kind of work. The Vision 2020 publications derived from IMPACT modeling results, are a good example of this.

Ethiopia, India, Senegal, South Africa