Year: 2015

I was in Mali recently where I met a woman, Maimouna Coulibaly, who several years ago left her job in the United States and returned to her home country to start a seed company called Faso Kaba. She quickly and confidently ramped up production, from 100 tons per year to over 1,000. She is eager to keep expanding, but she’s having a hard time finding financing.

I can’t tell you how many times in the last month someone has come up to me and said something like, “Do you think I should stop eating almonds?” or “I really miss almond butter, but I just can’t bring myself to buy it anymore.”

A new Chicago Council report, Leveraging Innovation to Feed the Future, says that innovation will be essential to meeting future food needs driven by urbanization and population growth, especially in the face of rising temperatures, resource scarcity, and the increasing volatility of climate events.

In recent years, as governments have begun to protect tropical forests because of the carbon they store, other vast tropical ecosystems have come under increasing threat. These are the wet savannas, which have a mix of grasses, trees and shrubs and receive enough rainfall to grow crops.

There is some talk about the food movement’s winning. I’m not even sure such a thing as a food movement exists.

is back to talking about poverty, taking to CBS’s Face the Nation this past weekend to lay out his plans for tackling it. Some of his ideas on the topic are worthwhile — he’s right that the Earned Income Tax Credit needs to be increased — and the fact that a major national politician has taken an interest in the topic at all is a cheering development.

On April 23, the House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously voted the amended Global Food Security Act of 2015 (H.R. 1567) out of Committee. Co-sponsored by 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans, the legislation is an effort to ensure the future of programmatic funding for food security efforts.

Poverty looks pretty great if you’re not living in it. The government gives you free money to spend on steak and lobster, on tattoos and spa days, on — why not? — cruise vacations and psychic visits.

The low wages paid by businesses, including some of the largest and most profitable companies in the U.S. – like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart – are costing taxpayers nearly $153 billion a year.

The following post by IFPRI senior researcher Lawrence Haddad is part of an ongoing series of blog stories celebrating IFPRI’s 40th anniversary. Each story authored by current and former IFPRI research staff highlights a key research topic through the years from the personal perspective of the researcher.