by Nurul Islam
In the early 1960s a small group of visionaries recognized that technological innovations would be crucial to expanding Asia's food supplies. A decade later, in a landmark decision to strengthen agricultural research, the CGIAR was created.
The world food crisis of 1973 was a watershed in the formulation of the development strategy for the world food and agricultural sector for the next two decades. Two questions captured the attention of the international community and were reflected in the recommendations of the World Food Conference of 1974: How could the world feed itself in the long run as its population increased and as rising incomes pressed on the world's agricultural resources? How could fluctuations in world food supplies and food prices such as those that resulted in the sudden, acute large-scale food shortages of 1973 be dealt with?
In the years immediately following the crisis, there was a flurry of policy research on using food stocks to stabilize prices and external financing facilities to meet the import needs of low-income, food-deficit countries, as well as research on prospects for long-term food supply and demand.
Among the actions taken in the wake of the crisis were the strengthening of early warning and food information systems at the national and international levels and the implementation of long-term measures for promoting investment in the food and agriculture sector. The latter included the establishment of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Food Council (WFC), and the expansion of the international agricultural research system.
It was during this time that the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was established to undertake research on national and international policies to improve and expand access to food, with emphasis on poor countries and the poorest people in those countries. Although technological progress was the key to increased agricultural production, experience and analysis showed that sectoral and macro policies that affected incentive structures for farmers and institutions needed to be included in strategies for maximizing the spread of new technologies to all farmers. These considerations suggested the crucial role of policy research in feeding the world's poor.
This recognition led to the decision to bring IFPRI into the CGIAR system, with a mission to conduct policy research that cuts across commodities and countries and on issues of central importance for national and international action.
IFPRI research during the 1970s, and increasingly during the 1980s, illustrated that pricing and subsidy policies often were inefficient and did not help the disadvantaged target groups. The effects of trade and exchange rate policies on the incentives to agriculture far outweighed the effects of direct interventions through agricultural pricing and marketing policies. As the 1980s wore on and evidence accumulated of inefficiencies of large-scale state intervention programs, research priorities shifted to optimum ways in which sequencing, phasing, and speed of liberalization of markets for both inputs and outputs could be designed.
National food security often depends on access to food imports and hence on the ability of developing countries to expand their agricultural exports. IFPRI, along with others, analyzed and quantified the welfare benefits for developing countries of trade liberalization in OECD countries as well as intra-developing-country trade liberalization.
IFPRI studies in South Asia demonstrated that small and landless farmers did benefit from the "green revolution" through increased employment and income and from lower food prices. Large benefits to urban consumers through lower food prices also were identified. Productivity growth in agriculture tended to strengthen "multiplier effects" on the nonagricultural sector through various linkages.
Concern about the continuation or progress of the green revolution led to research on policies affecting marketing, distributing, and pricing of modern inputs such as fertilizer, seeds, pesticides, and irrigation. Research on output markets and on credit and infrastructure followed.
The research priorities of the CGIAR system, as well as of IFPRI, evolved in response to changes in the world food situation and outlook and with the recognition that agricultural growth is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the alleviation or reduction of poverty and malnutrition.
This response stimulated research on the prospects and limitations of supplementary measures to ensure improved nutrition among the poor through public employment schemes, credit directed to the poor, income transfers through subsidized food and health services, and access to clean water and primary health care. IFPRI research addressed the fact that although a household, considered as a unit, might have enough calories, this did not ensure that the individual members of the household were equitably fed. Research on gender and age discrimination and on ways to correct these imbalances was initiated.
In recent years, environmental effects of agricultural intensification such as erosion, pollution, and loss of biodiversity have occupied the attention of policy-makers and researchers. The links between poverty and environmental degradation have become increasingly clear. Research was needed not only on environment-friendly technology but also on credit, taxation, subsidy, pricing policies and property rights issues that could prevent the environmentally damaging use of land and water resources.
Over the years, IFPRI's research agenda has sought to examine and provide policy options on wide-ranging issues bearing on agricultural growth, poverty alleviation, and, more recently, environmental protection. IFPRI continues to respond to new challenges in food policy research in line with its own comparative advantage and limited resources, and in collaboration with the other CGIAR centers. The CGIAR centers and their national collaborators continue to struggle to push the frontiers of technology, supported by appropriate policies and institutions, in order to improve nutrition and alleviate poverty for the developing world's poor.
(Nurul Islam is research fellow emeritus at IFPRI.)
(IFPRI Report 17/1)