IFPRI is a Research Center of CGIAR, the world's largest international agricultural research network, and the only CGIAR center solely dedicated to food policy research. IFPRI’s research is supported by more than 185 donors, and through a multi donor trust fund for the CGIAR, which is funded by national governments, multilateral funding and development agencies, and private foundations.
IFPRI's regional programs for Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and South Asia, as well as its country-level programs, respond to national demands for food policy research, strengthen local capacities for research and policy analysis, and support country-led development.[11][12] The Institute has around 600 employees from around the world working in over 80 countries, with more than half of its researchers based in low- and middle-income countries. In Africa, IFPRI maintains a regional office in Senegal and country programs in Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Sudan. IFRI’s South Asia office is based in India, with country offices in Bangladesh, China, and Myanmar. The Institute also operates a country office in Papua New Guinea.
The Institute publishes and shares its research and analysis through a range of publications, including peer-reviewed articles, books, briefs, and reports, blogs, and interactives, and different events, including conferences and seminars, among other activities.[20][21][22][23][24][25] IFPRI regularly contributes to major international meetings and events, such as the 28th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28) in 2023 in Dubai, where its researchers organized and participated in multiple events focusing on the nexus between climate change and food security and nutrition, social equity, gender equality, and resilience, among other topics.[26]
Scope
IFPRI’s research and engagement centers on a holistic three-pronged approach to contribute to reducing poverty and ensuring that all people have access to sustainable diets: (1) clarify the situation and outlook of a particular situation or challenge, (2) test and scale potential technological and policy solutions, and (3) help build an enabling environment to facilitate change.
IFPRI collaborates with more than 300 partner organizations to increase the impact of the Institute’s research and build connections across topical areas and the policy community for sustainable, resilient, and equitable agriculture and food systems. These partners include a wide range of local and national partners in low- and middle-income countries, as well as research, scaling, advocacy, and funding partners, who help provide rigorous, policy-relevant evidence and recommendations to policymakers, donors, the private sector, and civil society. As part of CGIAR, IFPRI also maintains strong engagement with colleagues from other CGIAR Centers.
Research Areas
IFPRI conducts cross-cutting research on a wide range of topics, including nutrition, food prices, gender, climate change, natural resource management, agricultural innovation, social protection, and agricultural extension. The Institute’s efforts focus on research and innovation to deliver integrated policies, investments, governance processes, and capacity building that support equitable and sustainable food systems transformation, as well as improved livelihoods and healthy diets. IFPRI adapts its research and capacity strengthening work to address diverse challenges and opportunities in different countries around the world.
IFPRI’s policy and research products are targeted to multiple audiences, including policymakers, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), civil society organizations, donors, advisors, and the media. IFPRI publications are open access.[27]
IFPRI’s publications and outputs include books, reports, newsletters, briefs, fact sheets, blogs, and photo essays.[28] The Institute is also involved in the collection of primary data and the compilation and processing of secondary data.[29] IFPRI researchers publish extensively in top journals in the fields of agricultural economics, development, food policy, nutrition, and more.
The Global Food Policy Report is IFPRI's flagship publication. To meet the needs of policymakers and researchers focused on food security and nutrition, this annual report presents an overview of a salient topic in the field and discusses relevant challenges and solutions in major world regions.
In recent years, IFPRI’s Global Food Policy Report has focused on pressing issues facing the world’s food systems, including the role of sustainable healthy diets in human and planetary well-being, approaches to building resilience to food crises, food system actions to increase adaptation and resilience to climate change, and the need for food systems transformation in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Organizational structure
IFPRI is led by Dr. Johan Swinnen and governed by its Board of Trustees.[30] IFPRI’s research activities are organized into seven research units:
Development Strategies and Governance
Foresight and Policy Modeling
Innovation Policy and Scaling
Natural Resources and Resilience
Markets, Trade, and Institutions
Nutrition, Diets, and Health
Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion
Researchers from multiple units staff IFPRI’s country offices and regional offices in Africa and Asia.
Other divisions within IFPRI include the Office of the Director General, Communications and Public Affairs, Finance and Administration, and Human Resources.
Dale E. Hathaway (1975–1977, founding director general)
Impact
Evaluating the impact of policy-oriented research is a complex undertaking, considering difficulties in quantifying the impact of knowledge and ideas on reduced poverty and/or increased income or the attribution of a change in these numbers to a specific study or research project.[31]
Despite the challenges of evaluating research impact, IFPRI has commissioned 46 independent, peer-reviewed assessments of its work. The Institute also works with researchers to validate its efforts and shares these findings through peer-reviewed briefs, brochures, blogs, events, and other outputs. IFPRI publishes a blog series called Making a Difference, which showcases impact stories that represent a range of research, communications, and capacity-strengthening work.
Conservative estimates of IFPRI’s impact show that just a few of the Institute’s activities—in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Mexico, Tanzania, and Viet Nam—have led to economic and environmental benefits exceeding US$1 billion. IFPRI’s research has also been shown to have indirectly benefited more than 270 million people around the world. In Brazil, IFPRI’s evaluation of the country’s conditional cash transfer program led to changes in the targeting approach of its successor program, Bolsa Família, which has 52 million beneficiaries. In Viet Nam, the Institute’s policy advice on rice market reforms helped create better incomes and food security for 24 million people engaged in rice farming. IFPRI’s research on the economic benefits of road building in India helped 18 million people escape poverty through the Prime Minister’s Rural Roads Program.[32]
Criticism
Evaluations from the early 2000s and late 1990s praise the Institute’s quality and quantity of work, but critique its priorities in selecting research topics and its efforts to undertake capacity-strengthening and other outreach activities. Critics have also questioned whether IFPRI focused too much on conducting world supply-demand projections and following technical pursuits to the detriment of doing analyses of applied policies, political economy, and the impacts of agricultural subsidies and incentives for investment in agricultural research and development.[33]
IFPRI and CGIAR have also been criticized for receiving funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with critics fearing that the Foundation’s influence will lead to the promotion of an agribusiness agenda that ignores broader social and economic factors.[34][35]
Critics argue that several efforts to improve collaboration, effectiveness, and efficiency among the CGIAR Research Centers have been too slow or inadequate, and some critiques have pointed to a perceived lack of clear research priorities, buy-in from the Global South, and diversity in leadership, as well as an overly bureaucratic, “business-as-usual” approach to restructuring.[36][37]
Related Research Articles
Agricultural science is a broad multidisciplinary field of biology that encompasses the parts of exact, natural, economic and social sciences that are used in the practice and understanding of agriculture. Professionals of the agricultural science are called agricultural scientists or agriculturists.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center is a non-profit research-for-development organization that develops improved varieties of wheat and maize with the aim of contributing to food security, and innovates agricultural practices to help boost production, prevent crop disease and improve smallholder farmers' livelihoods. CIMMYT is one of the 15 CGIAR centers. CIMMYT is known for hosting the world's largest maize and wheat genebank at its headquarters in Mexico.
Agricultural economics is an applied field of economics concerned with the application of economic theory in optimizing the production and distribution of food and fiber products. Agricultural economics began as a branch of economics that specifically dealt with land usage. It focused on maximizing the crop yield while maintaining a good soil ecosystem. Throughout the 20th century the discipline expanded and the current scope of the discipline is much broader. Agricultural economics today includes a variety of applied areas, having considerable overlap with conventional economics. Agricultural economists have made substantial contributions to research in economics, econometrics, development economics, and environmental economics. Agricultural economics influences food policy, agricultural policy, and environmental policy.
CGIAR is a global partnership that unites international organizations engaged in research about food security. CGIAR research aims to reduce rural poverty, increase food security, improve human health and nutrition, and sustainable management of natural resources.
The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) is an international organisation which conducts agricultural research for rural development, headquartered in Patancheru, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, with several regional centres and research stations . It was founded in 1972 by a consortium of organisations convened by the Ford- and the Rockefeller- foundations. Its charter was signed by the FAO and the UNDP.
The Global Hunger Index (GHI) is a tool that attempts to measure and track hunger globally as well as by region and by country, prepared by European NGOs of Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe. The GHI is calculated annually, and its results appear in a report issued in October each year.
Shenggen Fan (樊胜根) was the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) between 2009 and 2019.
Leveraging Agriculture for Improving Nutrition and Health is the title of a global policy consultation and international conference to be held in New Delhi, India from 10 to 12 February 2011, which will examine the linkages between work undertaken in the agriculture, nutrition and health sectors. The conference is organized by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) with support from the Asian Development Bank, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), the Indian Economic Association, IDRC, PepsiCo, UK Department for International Development (DFID), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Feed the Future Initiative, and The World Bank.
The Regional Strategic Analysis and Knowledge Support System (ReSAKSS) was established in 2006 and compiles and analyzes information to help design and evaluate rural development strategies and monitor the progress of the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). CAADP is a program of the African Union and the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD), which aims to increase the share of national budgets allocated to agriculture.
Lawrence James Haddad, is a British economist whose main research focuses on how to make food systems work better to advance the nutrition status of people globally.
Lindiwe Sibanda Majele (born 1963) is a Zimbabwean professor, scientist, policy advocate and influencer on food systems. She currently serves as director and chair of the ARUA Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Food Systems (ARUA-SFS) at the University of Pretoria in Pretoria, South Africa as well as founder and managing director of Linds Agricultural Services Pvt Ltd. in Harare, Zimbabwe. She is currently a board member of Nestlé where she is also a member of the Sustainability Committee.
Gerald Shively is an American economist and professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University. He teaches and publishes research articles and books related to contemporary policy-related issues in economic development. His specializations are in poverty, food security and sustainable development.
Klaus von Grebmer, descendant of an old Austrian family Grebmer_zu_Wolfsthurn, is a Swiss-German economist and one of the pioneers of the Global Hunger Index. He is currently a Research Fellow Emeritus and Strategic Adviser at the International Food Policy Research Institute since 2012. Klaus von Grebmer joined the International Food Policy Research Institute as Director of the Communications Division in 1999. During 2013 von Grebmer served as acting director for Communications and Marketing at WorldFish.
Zhu Ling is a Chinese economist who served as the deputy director and researcher in the Institute of Economics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), professor of graduate school and supervisor of doctorate student at Institute of Economics, CASS. She was elected a member of CASS in 2010. Previously, she was an executive member at International Association of Agricultural Economics (IAAE), Vice president of the Chinese Agricultural & Applied Economics Association, and had joined the research group of Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations.
Jessica Fanzo is an American scientist. She is a Professor of Climate and Director of the Food for Humanity Initiative at the Columbia Climate School. Prior to joining Columbia in July 2023, she was the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Global Food and Agriculture Policy and Ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. She was the first laureate of the Carasso Foundation’s Sustainable Diets Prize in 2012 for her research on sustainable food and diets for long-term human health. In 2024, Fanzo was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
William Alan Masters is an American economist, teaching and conducting research on agricultural economics and food policy in the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, where he also has a secondary appointment in the Department of Economics.
Joachim von Braun is a German agricultural scientist and currently director of a department of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn and President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Awudu Abdulai is a Ghanaian agricultural and development economist, and professor at the Institute of Food Economics and Consumption Studies, University of Kiel, Germany. His research and teaching focus on issues related to poverty alleviation, food and nutrition security, consumer behavior, and sustainable agriculture.
Uma Lele is an agricultural economist, currently at the Institute of Economic Growth at the University of Delhi, India. She has spent much of her career working with the World Bank and other international organizations.
Johan "Jo" Swinnen is the Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and Managing Director of the Systems Transformation Science Group of CGIAR.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
