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Despite significant progress the world continues to bear a triple burden of malnutrition. These three burdens are related, but distinctly different, problems: energy deficiencies (hunger), micronutrient deficiencies (hidden hunger), 3 and excessive net energy intake and unhealthy diets overweight/obesity). Despite significant progress, 795 million people still are not getting the minimum dietary energy needs. The majority of these people are in Sub-Saharan Africa, in which 1 in 4 people are hungry; and in South Asia, in which 1 in 6 people are hungry. More than 2 billion people are deficient in key vitamins and minerals7 that are necessary for growth, development, and disease prevention. Globally, over 2 billion people are overweight or obese, two-thirds of whom live in developing countries. This issue clearly is not just a developed country problem. Energy and micronutrient deficiency are contributors to the 165 million children under 5 who are stunted and cannot grow to achieve their full potential. Globally, this number is equivalent to approximately 1 in 4 children under 5 years, with an even more concentrated situation in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia (1 in 3 children). Arguably child stunting is one of the biggest development challenges. If not addressed it will profoundly undermine our ability to end poverty and promote shared prosperity.

The longstanding “cash versus food” debate has received renewed attention in both research and practice. This paper reviews key issues shaping the debate and presents new evidence from randomized and quasi-experimental evaluations that deliberately compare cash and in-kind food transfers in ten developing counties. Findings show that relative effectiveness cannot be generalized: although some differences emerge in terms of food consumption and dietary diversity, average impacts tend to depend on context, specific objectives, and their measurement. Costs for cash transfers and vouchers tend to be significantly lower relative to in-kind food. Yet the consistency and robustness of methods for efficiency analyses varies greatly.

Everyone knows about seasonality. But what exactly do we know? This study systematically measures seasonal price gaps at 193 markets for 13 food commodities in seven African countries. It shows that the commonly used dummy variable or moving average deviation methods to estimate the seasonal gap can yield substantial upward bias. This can be partially circumvented using trigonometric and sawtooth models, which are more parsimonious. Among staple crops, seasonality is highest for maize (33 percent on average) and lowest for rice (16½ percent). This is two and a half to three times larger than in the international reference markets. Seasonality varies substantially across market places, but maize is the only crop in which there are important systematic country effects. Malawi, where maize is the main staple, emerges as exhibiting the most acute seasonal differences. Reaching the Sustainable Development Goal of Zero Hunger requires renewed policy attention to seasonality in food prices and consumption.

This paper revisits the extent of seasonality in African livelihoods. It uses 19 years of monthly food prices from 20 markets and three years of nationally representative household panel surveys from Tanzania. Trigonometric specifications are introduced to measure the seasonal gap. When samples are short and seasonality is poorly defined, they produce less upward bias than the common dummy variable approach. On average, the seasonal gap for maize prices is estimated to be 27 percent; it is 15 percent for rice. In both cases it is two and a half to three times higher than in the international reference market. Food price seasonality is not a major contributor to food price volatility, but it does translate into seasonal variation in caloric intake of about 10 percent among poor urban households and rural net food sellers. Rural net food-buying households appear able to smooth their consumption. The disappearance of seasonality from Africas development debate seems premature.

Public transfer programs that allow beneficiaries to choose the transferred good may be more efficient, but the poorest beneficiaries may not participate if the good chosen is too costly. A model shows that program targeting and consumption impacts are tied to selected quality of the provided good. Evidence from a randomized trial in rural India in which groups of beneficiaries choose the variety of rice to be offered as a subsidized loan confirms that choosing lower cost goods self-targets the program towards the poorest beneficiaries. Consumption impacts are biggest for wealthiest households and may be negative for moderately poor households.

This paper discusses how catastrophe crop risk models can be used to assess food security needs at the sovereign level for the purpose of risk transfer. The rationale for a system to evaluate food security needs at the national level is discussed. The role of technology and remote sensing data availability as an enabler of catastrophe crop risk models is discussed followed by a description of the framework of catastrophe crop models for droughts, representing the peril for which catastrophe models have had the most success. The integration of the output of catastrophe crop models with a food security vulnerability assessment model is described next. Recent advances in analytical modeling of various types of shocks in assessing food security are described but the operational use of these analytical models in the development of food security assessment for risk transfer is seen to be limited for now because of the complexity of these analytical models. The food security vulnerability modeling in the African Risk Capacity, ARC, model is then described as showing a practical solution to the complex problem of assessing food security via a model. Lastly, the challenges faced in risk transfer of sovereign food security risks are discussed.

Maternal and child undernutrition is a pervasive and detrimental condition in Papua New Guinea. Despite rapid economic growth during the past decade, the stunting rate for children under 5, one of the primary indicators for child undernutrition, was estimated at 46 percent in Papua New Guinea in 2010, stagnant from 44 percent in 2005. This paper analyzes the association between the demographic, socioeconomic, environmental, and health-related factors on nutritional status for children under age 5 years, using the 2009–10 Papua New Guinea Household Income and Expenditure Survey. Stunting and underweight rates sharply rise in the first 24 months. Even in the better-off quintiles, children suffer from suboptimal breastfeeding and complementary food in the first 24 months. In general, the regression results showed that household wealth and geographic location are crucial factors that contribute to children’s malnutrition. More importantly, food quality, measured by protein intake, has significant predicting power on child malnutrition. Broadly increasing socioeconomic status and improving the quantity and quality of caloric intake are general steps to improving health outcomes in Papua New Guinea. In addition, three key areas were identified as critical to alleviating the persistent and detrimental stunting rate in the country: (1) exclusive breastfeeding and complementary food; (2) interventions by health workers; and (3) nutrition education.

The report Africa Can Help Feed Africa (World Bank 2012) showed that increasing food staples1 supply can be met by better connecting African markets to each other. That report called for a stronger focus on removing trade barriers and building on the forces of regional integration. This report builds on the lessons of Africa Can Help Feed Africa by looking into the specific circum¬stances met in West Africa, home to one-third of the continent’s population and to some of its most vulnerable countries. Staple foods are the main source of calories in Africa and in West Africa. In that region, rice, followed by maize and cassava, provides the main source of calories in coastal countries, with millet and sorghum being an important source of food in Sahelian countries (Haggblade et al. 2012). The challenge of food supply is particularly acute in West Africa with some of the world’s fastest growing populations, including urban populations. West Africa’s 2011 population of 342 million is expected to increase to 516 million by 2030 and to 815 million by 2050 (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2013); in this time frame, the region’s urban population will grow from 44 percent to 63 percent of the total population (United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division 2014). As this report will show, strong reasons exist to bring a more strategic focus on promoting regional trade. The first compelling reason is that there is already a sizeable amount of trade in the region, revealing existing important complementarities between countries in the ECOWAS space. Because a large share of this trade is informal, this reality is not always well taken into account. A second reason is that developing these complementarities by facilitating trade and creating the regional soft and hard infra¬structure to incite cross-border flows would further enable (a) the exploitation of comparative advan¬tages and economies of scale in the region; (b) access to and diffusion of better production technologies; (c) competitive access to inputs, research, and extension services; and (d) improved security in the face of shocks that lead to food crises. Finally, a third reason is that existing national policies that affect trade are, by and large, inefficient and incoherent at the regional level; therefore a better use of policy making and institutions is needed to achieve food policy objectives.

This report provides an analysis of food security in Moldova. It attempts to outline the specific characteristics of food insecurity found in Moldova and to identify its underlying causes. This report provides a basis on which sound public policy can be built. The understanding of food security as a concept has evolved in Moldova over time, but policy has remained focused on food availability as the primary attribute of food security. The report looks at how many people are food insecure in Moldova, where these people live, who they are, and why they face food security challenges. The report adopts the international food security concept and analytical framework based on the four key dimensions: (i) the availability of food; (ii) access to food; (iii) utilization of food; and (iv) the stability of these three dimensions over time. The report is divided into following parts. The part one outlines the methodology used and provides a brief overview of Moldovas agriculture sector. In part two the report focuses on overall food security outcomes by assessing how many people are food insecure in Moldova, where do they live, who they are, and when is food security most affecting them. Part three provides a comprehensive analysis of the four dimensions of food security (availability, access, utilization, and stability) and identifies bottlenecks. Part four introduces the institutional actors and the policy framework. The report concludes with policy recommendations.

Modifying the national poverty line to the context of observed consumption patterns of the poor is becoming popular. A context-specific poverty line would be more consistent with preferences. This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence that the contrary holds and that the national poverty line is more appropriate for comparing living standards among the poor, at least under prevailing conditions in Mozambique and Ghana. The problem lies in the risk of downscaling the burden associated with cheap-calorie diets and the low nonfood component of the rural poor. The paper illustrates how observed behavior may neither reveal preferences nor detect heterogeneous preferences among the poor. Rather, the consumption pattern is the upshot of the poverty condition itself. Poverty is confused with preferences if observed cheap-calorie diets are seen as a matter of taste, whereas in fact they reflect a lack of means to consume a preferred diet of higher quality, as food Engel curve estimates indicate. Likewise, a smaller nonfood component is not a matter of a particular distaste, but an adaptation to the fact that various nonfood items (such as transport) and basic services (such as electricity and health) are simply absent in rural areas.

South Sudan is a fragile country beset by conflicts. The oil shutdown accompanied by a border closure in 2012 was resolved, but ongoing military clashes between factions of the ruling party have affected livelihoods since December 2013. Before the onset of these conflicts, large parts of the population were food insecure (2 out of 3 people) and lived in poverty (1 out of 2 people). This note estimates and juxtaposes the impact of the oil shutdown and the ongoing military conflict on livelihoods based on food price changes, predicted harvest losses and displacement. The resulting poverty estimates help to understand the structural implications of these conflicts. But to validate these numbers, test the underlying modeling assumptions and inform a policy response, new data needs to be collected urgently.