Household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCES) are multipurpose surveys that are routinely conducted to collect data on household food consumption and availability in more than 120 countries. HCES are increasingly being used to calculate proxy estimates of food consumption, nutrient intakes, and nutrition status, often at the individual level. Rarely, however, do they collect information on meal participation, despite growing evidence that it is an increasingly important and variable component of the quantity of food consumed or available in a household. This paper explores the significance of adjusting for meal participation in making inferences about apparent food consumption and nutrient intakes. It focuses on two distinct sets of additional information requirements for enhancing the reliability and precision of measures of food consumption: (1) individual household members’ and household guests’ meal-eating behaviors, and (2) the number and apparent nutritional significance of meals. While the most comprehensive and precise accounting of intakes of individual food consumption and nutrients requires both types of information, the magnitude of the changes required in HCES questionnaires to capture them is likely to be prohibitive. Consequently, for many HCES, a “second best” approach may be the most effective method, at least in the short term. The paper empirically explores some of the relatively few HCES that currently attempt to capture some of these information requirements. In addition, it assesses their value-added to prioritize the global agenda for strengthening HCES measurement of food consumption in support of more evidence-based nutrition policy making.

To feed a growing population, agricultural productivity needs to increase dramatically. Agricultural extension information, with its public, non-rival nature, is generally undersupplied, and public provision remains challenging. In this research, we explore the effectiveness of alternative modes of agricultural extension information delivery. We test whether simple agricultural extension video messages delivered through Android tablets increase knowledge of recommended practices in seed selection, storage, and handling among a sample of potato farmers in southwestern Uganda. Using a field experiment with ex ante matching in a factorial design, we find that showing agricultural extension videos significantly affects farmers’ knowledge. However, our results suggest impact pathways that go beyond simply replicating what was shown in the video. Video messages may also trigger a process of abstraction, whereby farmers apply insights gained in one context to a different context. Alternatively, video messages may activate knowledge farmers already posses but, for some reason, do not use.

As the nature of global malnutrition changes, there is a growing need and increasing urgency for more and better information about food consumption and dietary patterns. The past two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the number, availability, and analysis of the food consumption data collected in a variety of multipurpose household surveys, referred to collectively as household consumption and expenditure surveys (HCESs). These surveys are heterogeneous, and their quality varies substantially by country. Still, they share some common shortcomings in their measurement of food consumption, nutrient intakes, and nutrition status that undermine their relevance and reliability for purposes of designing and implementing food policies and programs. This review crafts a strategic approach to the unfinished global agenda of improving HCESs’ collection of food consumption data. Starting with the priority studies recommended by a 100-country HCES review (Smith, Dupriez, and Troubat 2014), it focuses on a strategic subset of those studies that deal most directly and exclusively with the measurement of food, and that are of fundamental importance to all HCES stakeholders in low- and middle-income countries. Drawing from the literature, this study provides a more detailed, more circumspect justification as to why these particular studies are needed, while identifying key hypotheses, explaining why these studies are of growing urgency, and demonstrating why now is a propitious time for undertaking them. The review also identifies important study design considerations while pointing out potential challenges to successful implementation stemming from technical capacity, economic, administrative, and political considerations. Six key studies are rank ordered from a global perspective as follows, taking into account (1) the likely shared consensus that a topic is an important source of measurement error in estimating consumption; (2) the perceived urgency of the need for addressing a particular source of measurement error; (3) the perceived likelihood of success—that is, that the efforts will improve the accuracy of measurement; (4) whether or not the study entails modifying the questionnaire; (5) the ease with which a study may begin; and (6) the extent to which the study is independent of necessary negotiations with existing HCES stakeholders because of the types of changes it is likely to entail (in either the questionnaire or the way the data have traditionally been processed).

Rising energy expenditures due to more intensive use of energy in modern agriculture and increasing energy prices may affect rural households’ agricultural incomes, particularly the incomes of the rural poor in developing countries. However, the exact link between energy costs and income among the rural poor needs further empirical investigation. This paper aims to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between energy use and family income, using household-level panel data collected from 500 potato farmers in a poor region of Northern China, where eliminating poverty by 2020 is now the top government priority. The findings indicate that potato plays an important role in the surveyed families’ incomes, and the energy costs of potato production have a significant negative relationship with family income. However, the significance of the negative relationship is robust only for farmers with low economic standing, such as those living below the poverty line or just above it. Energy costs also have a significant negative relationship with the family incomes of those cultivating a certain size of potato-sown area, but this relationship becomes insignificant when farmers have too small of a potato-sown area. These findings indicate that in general, reducing energy costs helps the poor increase their income but is not necessarily helpful to those with high economic standing or a relatively small potato-sown area. If rural development policies are to support poverty reduction and energy savings (at least in major potato production regions), interventions aimed at energy cost reduction may be effective only for the poor whose family income depends, to a relatively high degree, on potato production.

Gold mining is the main economic activity in Madre de Dios, Peru. Despite efforts, the state has not yet managed to identify a formalization process achievable for small operators. In addition, many small-scale miners are driven by poverty and need income to provide for their basic needs. Because participation in small-scale mining is largely driven by poverty, it is likely that, in the longer term, much artisanal mining activity will disappear naturally if, through economic development, more attractive work options become available. This paper reviews the importance of illegal mining in Madre de Dios and the potential for development of the agriculture sector. It also analyzes three different policy scenarios: (1) government spending to rectify the environmental damage in the region caused by illegal mining, (2) development of the agricultural sector in the region, and (3) a final scenario with both environmental restoration and agricultural development. Results show that additional government spending in Madre de Dios does not significantly affect the rest of the country and that investment in agriculture can achieve structural change in the gross domestic product of Madre de Dios. Development of the agricultural sector also slightly increases household incomes in Madre de Dios.

This research was undertaken to better assess the role of mechanization in the future of smallholder farmers in Nepal. It addresses the knowledge gap about whether promoting mechanization that is often complementary to land can effectively support smallholders, particularly in the face of a growing nonfarm sector. Rising rural wages in Nepal have increasingly put pressures on smallholder farmers, who tend to operate labor-intensive farming. Agricultural mechanization through custom hiring of tractor services has recently been considered as an option to mitigate the impact of rising labor costs for smallholders. However, the benefit of agricultural mechanization may still be better captured by exploiting the economies of scale of medium to large farmers rather than smallholders. In the meantime, the Nepal agricultural sector still employs a disproportionate share of workers given its share in the economy, potentially depressing agricultural labor productivity. It is therefore an important policy question whether to (1) continue supporting smallholders through custom-hired tractor services or (2) encourage smallholders to rent their farms out to medium-size or larger farmers, while helping smallholders specialize in the nonfarm sector, where their labor productivity may be higher. Using samples from the Terai zone—one of the agroecological belts in Nepal, largely consisting of lowland plains— from the Nepal Living Standards Survey, we assess whether the benefits of hiring in tractor services are greater among medium to large farmers than among smallholders, and how these benefits may depend on smallholders’ decision to remain in or leave farming. This study also contributes to the impact evaluation literature by showing that jointly assessing the effects of two treatments (whether to adopt custom-hired tractor services and continue farming, or to search for better options and specialize in off-farm activities) can lead to different implications than assessing them separately. Our analyses suggest that the government should continue to promote custom-hired tractor services not only for medium to large farmers but also for smallholders. If, over time, barriers to specializing in nonfarm activities are lowered and more smallholders start leaving farming, mechanization may no longer benefit the remaining smallholders. Support for mechanization can then be focused more on medium to large farmers, while types of support other than mechanization can be devised for the remaining smallholders.

This study was undertaken to assess the utility of remotely sensed net primary productivity (NPP) data to measure agricultural sustainability by applying a new methodology that captures spatial variability and trends in total NPP and in NPP removed at harvest. The sustainable intensification of agriculture is widely promoted as a means for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and transitioning toward a more productive, sustainable, and inclusive agriculture, particularity in fragile environments. Yet critics claim that the 17 SDGs and 169 targets are immeasurable and unmanageable. We propose adoption of satellite-estimated, time-series NPP data to monitor agricultural intensification and sustainability, as it is one indicator potentially valuable across several SDGs. To illustrate, we present a unique monitoring framework and a novel indicator, the agricultural appropriation of net primary productivity (AANPP) and analyze spatial trends in NPP and AANPP across the continent of Africa. AANPP focuses on the proportion of total crop NPP removed at harvest. We estimate AANPP by overlaying remotely sensed satellite imagery with rasterized crop production data at 10-by-10-kilometer spatial resolution; we explore variation in NPP and AANPP in terms of food and ecological security. The spatial distribution of NPP and AANPP illustrates the dominance of cropping systems as spatial drivers of NPP across many regions in West and East Africa, as well as in the fertile river valleys across North Africa and the Sahel, where access to irrigation and other technological inputs are inflating AANPP relative to NPP. A comparison of 2000 and 2005 datasets showed increasing AANPP in African countries south of the Sahara—particularly in Mozambique, Angola, and Zambia—whereas NPP either held stable or decreased considerably. This pattern was especially evident subnationally in Ethiopia. Such trends highlight increasing vulnerability of populations to food and ecological insecurity. When combined with other indicators and time-series data, the significance of NPP and the capacity of spatially explicit datasets have far-reaching implications for monitoring the progress of sustainable development in a post-2015 world.

What are the political and institutional prerequisites for pursuing policies that contribute to structural transformation? This paper addresses this question by focusing on Ghana, which has achieved sustained economic growth in recent decades and is broadly lauded for its environment of political pluralism, respect for human rights, free and fair elections, and vocal civil society. Yet, despite these virtues, Ghana remains unable to achieve substantial structural transformation as identified as changes in economic productivity driven by value-added within sectors and shifts in the allocation of labor between sectors. This paper argues that Ghana is strongly democratic but plagued by weak state capacity, and these politico-institutional characteristics have shaped the economic policies pursued, including in the agricultural sector, and the resultant development trajectory. Specifically, three political economy factors have undermined Ghana’s ability to achieve substantive structural transformation since then. First, democracy has enabled a broader range of interest groups to permeate policymaking decisions, often resulting in policy backtracking and volatility as well as fiscal deficits around elections that, among other things, stifle credit access for domestic business through high interest rates. Secondly, public sector reforms were not pursued with the same vigor as macroeconomic reforms, meaning that the state has lacked the capacity typically necessary to identify winning industries or to actively facilitate the transition to higher value-added sectors. Thirdly, successive governments, regardless of party, have failed to actively invest in building strong, productive relationships with the private sector, which is a historical legacy of the strong distrust and alienation of the private sector that characterized previous government administrations.

The impressive growth in aquaculture is now commonly dubbed a “blue revolution.” In some Asian countries, fish availability has increased at a faster rate in recent decades than did cereal availability during the Green Revolution. As an example, Bangladesh is one country where aquaculture has increased almost eightfold since the early 1990s. This growth has important implications for food and nutrition securities. Yet, there is little research on the determinants and impacts of this growth to document the lessons, identify evolving issues, and guide policy discussions. This paper attempts to fill that gap. Using several rounds of nationally representative household survey data, the authors conducted microsimulations to generate disaggregated estimates. The results show that, between 2000 and 2010, about 12 percent of Bangladesh’s overall poverty reduction can be attributed to aquaculture growth. In other words, of the 18 million Bangladeshis who escaped poverty during this period, more than 2 million of them managed to do so because of the growth in aquaculture. However, the results vary widely across income groups, with households in the third income quintile (which is not the poorest) benefiting the most. The implications of the results, methodological issues, and areas of future research are also discussed.

When and why do suboptimal agricultural policies persist despite technical evidence highlighting alternatives? And what explains episodes of reform after prolonged periods of policy inertia? This paper addresses these questions by applying the Kaleidoscope Model for agricultural and food security policy change to the specific case of agricultural input policy in Zambia. Since 2002, the Farmer Input Support Program (formerly the Fertilizer Support Program) has been a cornerstone of Zambia’s agricultural policy. Over the years, however, many researchers have highlighted weaknesses in the program and proposed other options. Based on semistructured interviews with key stakeholders and intensive process tracing using media, donor, parliamentary, and research reports, this paper examines how the program initially began in 2002 and during subsequent periods of reform in 2009 and 2015. Based on the findings here, periods of reform for input support programs are most likely when there is a confluence of multiple factors. These include the emergence of a window of opportunity in the form of either a focusing event (for example, a food crisis) or an institutional shift (for example, a new president or new ruling party) that coincides with broad stakeholder support for empirically grounded alternatives, available material resources, and sustained commitment from politically important policy makers.