The FAO Investment Centre provides a wide range of support services to help countries make more and better investments in food and agriculture. This review looks back at the work the Centre carried out with its partners in 2020. Despite a challenging year amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Centre’s global team supported investment-related policy and sector studies to increase policy dialogue and contributed to the design, technical assistance, supervision or evaluation of investment projects in 120 countries. The Centre increasingly linked both its policy work with investment support to scale up impact. And it promoted greater knowledge sharing and innovation, while also helping to strengthen the capacity of people and institutions to make better investment decisions. The Centre continues to remain relevant by adapting its skills and expertise to keep pace with a constantly evolving investment landscape and fast-changing world and by advocating for more sustainable agri-food systems.

Poised to become the go-to place for agrifood investment and finance solutions, the FAO Investment Centre provides a full suite of investment support services to FAO Members, working in over 120 countries. The Centre acts as a bridge between Members and financing partners to scale up agrifood investment for greater impact at country level. It also supports better enabling conditions for policy and investment and integrates FAO’s vast knowledge and expertise into national and regional investment planning.In 2022, the Centre helped design 45 IFI-approved public investment projects in 34 countries for a total of USD 8.8 billion in new investment – up 22 percent from the previous year’s USD 7.2 billion. And it provided implementation support to 275 ongoing investment projects representing a portfolio worth over USD 44.5 billion.Also notable were contributions to 52 agricultural studies, 25 sector studies, 17 policy studies and 6 policy dialogues and the publication of 34 new knowledge products – from a flagship study on carbon neutrality in agrifood systems to investing in youth in Africa, among others.

FAO’s major publications series are presented together in a user-friendly catalogue. The catalogue features all of the most active series, both new and long-standing, and is divided into areas of work, including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, trade and investment, among others. Each series entry includes technical specifications, language versions, most recent titles, relevant ISSNs, and QR codes linking to online resources in the FAO Document Repository.

More than a decade has passed since the publication of the series entitled Social Analysis of Agriculture and Rural Investment Projects, which comprises three complementary manuals – the Manager’s, Practitioner’s and Field guides. During this time, conflict, climate change and economic downturns have been driving up poverty, hunger, and socioeconomic inequalities, reducing the resilience of agrifood systems. In response, the FAO Investment Centre has updated the Social Analysis guides to address the evolving and volatile rural transformation context, providing programme managers, practitioners and field workers with a set of enhanced tools for the design, implementation and evaluation of inclusive investments in agrifood systems. Today’s investments must prioritize more demand-driven, people-centred, culturally sensitive and locally owned sustainable approaches, with increased attention to reducing gender and other inequalities. Operationalizing these principles contributes to FAO’s and financing agencies’ objectives of ending poverty, improving food security and nutrition, and reducing inequalities. The goal of the updated guides is to support investments that contribute to inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, aligned with the outcomes of the UN Food Systems Summit, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the core principle of leaving no one behind. This publication is part of the Investment Toolkits series under the FAO Investment Centre's Knowledge for Investment (K4I) series. The contents of this publication have been turned into three e-leaning courses, which are accessible for free through the FAO E-learning Academy.

This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the 1970s, when CGIAR was established and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was created to recycle petrodollars. Despite numerous international consultations and an increased number of actors, there has been no real growth in international assistance, except for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The book concurrently focuses on the structural transformation of developing countries in Asia and Africa, with some making great strides in small farmer development and in achieving structural transformation of their economies. Some have also achieved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG2, but most have not. Not only are some countries, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lagging behind, but they face new challenges of climate change, competition from emerging countries, population pressure, urbanization, environmental decay, and dietary transition. Lagging developing countries need huge investments in human capital, and physical and institutional infrastructure, to take advantage of rapid change in technologies, but the role of international assistance in financial transfers has diminished. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only set many poorer countries back but starkly revealed the weaknesses of past strategies. Transformative changes are needed in developing countries with international cooperation to achieve better outcomes. Will change in the United States bring new opportunities for multilateral cooperation?"--

The paper investigates the basics of public stockholding, exploring the objectives of such programmes, the policy instruments used to achieve them, and their possible market impacts. It also synthesizes country experiences in implementing public stockholding programmes in different regions and presents the evolution of administered and international prices over the last decade. Finally, the paper highlights the main elements of the WTO negotiations on public stockholding for food security, and some of the issues that need to be resolved to help achieve consensus in this area.

FAO is well positioned at the global level to offer relevant support to countries in achieving their SDG 2 targets and is committed to support the SDGs, a Global Agenda that it helped design. The new FAO’s Strategic Framework will provide an opportunity to promote and communicate FAO’s role in a coherent and joined-up manner, aligned with the 2030 Agenda. FAO has engaged with the current UN reform – strongly connected to the SDGs – with a very collaborative attitude. At the country level, which was the focus of the second phase of this evaluation, FAO’s position was found to be generally weaker due to its limited programmatic footprint. Nevertheless, a number of initiatives were “acting at scale” and producing results. Entry points to act at scale include support to develop laws and policies, to instigate agriculture trade and investment, to induce climate finance or South-South cooperation, and to education, both formal and informal. The depth and breadth of partnerships are generally increasing, but more partnerships with the private sector and mobilization of domestic resources would needed to make a serious impact on food systems.

The UN Rome-based agencies (RBAs) – FAO, IFAD and WFP – collaborate in many forms, from joint advocacy, policy and technical work to joint projects. This is the first independent evaluation of collaboration among the RBAs. It has been jointly undertaken by the evaluation offices of FAO, IFAD and WFP. The evaluation’s primary objective was to assess whether and to what extent RBA collaboration is contributing to the achievement of the 2030 agenda, particularly at country level. The evaluation found that collaboration among the RBAs is a daily reality, reflecting the shared strengths and commitment of these distinctly different organizations. Although competition for resources continues in some contexts, there is widespread recognition of complementarity. In some cases, the current collaborative management processes are not the best way to stimulate joint work, with some types of collaboration imposing higher transaction costs. The operating context for the RBAs is dynamic, with significant potential, and where realism and pragmatism are key to meaningful and effective collaboration. Presently, efforts to promote RBA collaboration are not fully grounded in an accurate understanding of the conditions in which it is most effectively pursued and the formal statements of corporate commitment to collaboration reflect this. The report makes six recommendations, of which five are addressed to management of the three agencies and one of which targets the member states. Recommendation 1. Update the MOU among the RBAs. Although the current five-year MOU was only signed three years ago, significant changes since then make an update necessary. Recommendation 2. Restructure and reinforce the coordination architecture for RBAC within the framework of UNDS reform to ensure that at all levels, the coordination and evaluation of RBAC includes more proactive efforts to develop and disseminate lessons and knowledge about how to optimize collaboration among and beyond the RBAs, about the costs and benefits of RBAC, and about technical experience that can be usefully shared. Recommendation 3. Further embrace the new joint programming mechanisms at the country level and ensure constructive, collaborative RBA engagement with these mechanisms. Recommendation 4. Focus administrative collaboration efforts on further embracing the United Nations efficiency agenda. Recommendation 5. In considering the development of joint projects and programmes, assess the costs and benefits of the proposed collaboration and only proceed if the benefits outweigh the costs. Recommendation 6. The Member States of the RBA Governing Bodies should reappraise and adequately resource their position on RBA collaboration.

The world’s agrifood systems are on the frontlines of climate change, both as a cause and a victim. The agrifood sector is increasingly being targeted and curbing emissions is becoming a key global investment and policy theme. 'Investing in carbon neutrality: utopia or the new green wave?' presents a comprehensive assessment of the key challenges and opportunities of carbon neutrality, and scopes out the road ahead for agrifood systems. It provides strategic insights on the actions needed to move the carbon neutrality agenda forward in terms of investment opportunities and public policy priorities, with important recommendations for development partners. This publication is part of the Directions in Investment series under the FAO Investment Centre's Knowledge for Investment (K4I) programme.

Rwanda’s agricultural sector accounts for about 29 percent of GDP and employs about 72 percent of the population that is economically active. It is still the dominant source of income for the majority of the poor who live in rural areas and is of significant importance in achieving the national priority objectives of sustainable economic growth, food security, and poverty alleviation. The report provides quantitative evidence on how the Government of Rwanda’s policies and expenditure decisions have supported its food and agriculture sector over the past decade. More, in particular, it provides information on the extent to which producers of key food (rice and wheat) and export crops (tea and coffee) are being supported – or penalized – by the policy. Also, it sheds light on the level and composition of public expenditures on food and agriculture, and how these have been changing over time. And finally, it assesses the coherence between the Government’s agricultural policies and its overall strategic priorities and provides insight into whether these are coherent.Conclusions and recommendations are believed to provide guidance for policy decision-making and reforming of policies that constrain productivity growth – the main engine for agriculture transformation and development.