Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger
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Ceres2030 will evaluate the agricultural interventions that can transform the lives and incomes of the world’s poorest farmers while preserving the environment. We believe consensus and communication can build political will and spur action, helping to achieve the objective set by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of zero hunger by 2030.
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Item A Policy-Centred Approach to Prioritize Effective Interventions to End Hunger: Ceres2030Bizikova, Livia; Laborde, David; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin (International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2022-11)Achieving the 2030 Agenda and the goals on addressing hunger, such as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, integrated and policy-relevant tools are needed to identify specific interventions and costs to assist with SDG 2 and another SDG implementation. Motivated by the need for tools to support evidence-based policy-making, three partner organizations—Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute and the International Institute for Sustainable Development—formed a three-year partnership in 2018 called Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger, with a focus on the targets of SDG 2. Drawing from the results from Ceres2030, this paper helps broadens the evidence base for effective interventions using a top-down macroeconomic model to evaluate and cost a portfolio of diverse actions, related trade-offs, and synergies to achieve the SDG targets. In addition, the research also assists by outlining ways of combining grey and peer- reviewed literature to improve evidence-based decision making by assisting policy-makers and donor agencies in allocating costs to policy options over the next decade necessary to achieve SDG 2 targets.Item Den Hunger beenden, die Einkommen steigern und das Klima schützen: Was würde das die Geldgeber kosten?Laborde, David; Parent, Marie; Smaller, Carin (2020)Als Reaktion auf die globale Verpflichtung, die Welt vom Hunger zu befreien, schloss sich Ceres2030 mit dem wissenschaflichen Journal Nature Research zusammen, um zwei miteinander verknüpfte Fragen zu beantworten: Erstens, was ist der Stand der Forschung zu erfolgreichen landwirtschaftliche Maßnahmen, vor allem jene die darauf abzielen, die Einkommen der Kleinerzeuger zu verdoppeln und die Umweltauswirkungen für die Landwirtschaft zu verbessern? Und zweitens, was kostet es die Regierungen, bis zum Jahr 2030 den Hunger zu beenden, die Einkommen der Kleinerzeuger zu verdoppeln und das Klima zu schützen? Das Projekt konzentriert sich auf drei der fünf Ziele im zweiten UN-Nachhaltigkeitsziel (Sustainable Development Goal, SDG 2, Kein Hunger). Es befasst sich dabei mit den öffentlichen Ausgaben, die in Ländern mit niedrigem und mittlerem Einkommen nötig sind, einschließlich der Beiträge von Gebern im Rahmen von Entwicklungshilfe (Official Development Assistance, ODA) (Laborde et al., 2020).Item Éradiquer la faim, accroître les revenus et protéger le climat : Combien cela coûterait-il aux donateurs ?Laborde, David; Parent, Marie; Smaller, Carin (2020)Étant donné l’engagement mondial d’éradiquer la faim dans le monde, Ceres2030 s’est associé à Nature Research pour répondre à deux questions interconnectées : tout d’abord, que nous disent les données publiées sur les interventions agricoles porteuses, notamment pour doubler les revenus des petits producteurs et améliorer les résultats environnementaux pour l’agriculture ? Deuxièmement, combien cela coûtera-t-il aux pays d’éradiquer la faim, de doubler les revenus des petits producteurs et de protéger le climat d’ici à 2030 ? Le projet se concentre sur trois des cinq cibles du deuxième objectif de développement durable (l’ODD 2, « faim zéro ») et examine les dépenses publiques nécessaires dans les pays à revenu faible et intermédiaire, y compris la contribution des donateurs par le biais de l’aide publique au développement (APD) (Laborde et al., 2020).Item Ceres2030: Nachhaltige Lösungen zur Beendigung des HungersLaborde, David; Porciello, Jaron; Murphy, Sophia; Smaller, Carin (2020)Die Ceres2030 und Nature Research Collection erweitert die Grenzen der Forschung zur Unterstützung von evidenzbasierter Entscheidungsfindung. Dies ist der erste Versuch, die Literatur zur landwirtschaftlichen Entwicklung der letzten 20 Jahre mit Hilfe von künstlicher Intelligenz zu analysieren, um eine strenge Methodik für die Evidenzsynthese zu unterstützen. Das Ceres2030-Team arbeitete mit Wissenschaftlern zusammen, um die Integration von Erkenntnissen aus dieser Forschung in die Parameter eines allgemeinen Gleichgewichtsmodells zu unterstützen. Bei dem Modell handelt es sich um eine der komplexesten Modellierungen, die je versucht wurden, bei der hunderttausende von Gleichungen angewandt wurden, um den verflochtenen Beziehungen über verschiedene Ebenen der Wirtschaft hinweg und über die Zeit Rechnung zu tragen. Das Modell verwendete Daten aus allen Ebenen, von der globalen bis zur nationalen, bis hinunter in die Haushalte.Item Ceres2030: Soluciones sostenibles para poner fin al hambreLaborde, David (2020)La colección Ceres2030 y Nature Research va más allá de los límites de la ciencia para apoyar la toma de decisiones basados en evidencia. Es el primer intento de analizar los últimos 20 años de material sobre el desarrollo agrícola por medio de la inteligencia artificial, para respaldar a una metodología rigurosa de síntesis de evidencia. El equipo Ceres2030 trabajó con investigadores para apoyar la integración de las conclusiones de dicha investigación a los parámetros de un modelo de equilibrio general. Este es uno de los ejercicios de modelización más complejos que se hayan intentado, con cientos de miles de ecuaciones que dan cuenta de las intrincadas relaciones entre los distintos niveles de la economía a lo largo del tiempo. El modelo tomó datos de todos los niveles, del global al nacional, incluyendo datos al nivel de los hogares.Item Ceres2030 : Solutions durables pour éradiquer la faimLaborde, David; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin (2020)Le Ceres2030 et la collection de travaux de Nature Reseach repoussent les frontières de la science pour soutenir une prise de décision fondée sur des preuves. C’est la première tentative d’analyse de la littérature des 20 dernières années sur le développement agricole en utilisant l’intelligence artificielle en appui d’une méthodologie rigoureuse de synthèse des données. L’équipe Ceres2030 a travaillé avec les chercheurs pour soutenir l’intégration des résultats de cette recherche dans les paramètres d’un modèle d’équilibre général. Ce modèle constitue l’un des exercices de modélisation les plus complexes jamais tentés, appliquant des centaines de milliers d’équations pour rendre compte de relations complexes à différents niveaux de l’économie au fil du temps. Il utilise des données à tous les niveaux, du mondial au national, et jusqu’aux ménages.Item Ending Hunger Sustainably: The role of social protectionWouterse, Fleur; Murphy, Sophia; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin (2020)In this brief, we focus on the effects of COVID-19 on hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, the region where undernourishment is most prevalent in the world and where the rates of increase are also greatest (FAO et al., 2020). Hunger tends to be concentrated in rural populations, whose livelihoods, incomes, and food security depend heavily on agriculture. In 2014, in the Malabo Declaration, African governments committed to ending hunger on the continent by 2025 through agriculture-led growth, integrating social protection programs and increasing agricultural productivity. The integration of social protection is critical to realizing this ambition, as economic growth alone will not eliminate deep-rooted inequalities and extreme poverty. The evidence shows that the greater the inequality in asset distribution (such as land, water, capital, finance, education, and health), the less likely it is for poor households to benefit from economic growth (FAO et al., 2019). People living in poverty face many constraints that prevent their taking advantage of the opportunities created by economic growth; social protection policies or programs designed to reduce poverty and vulnerability can help. Despite its importance, however, social protection coverage remains limited in sub-Saharan Africa, where, on average, fewer than 20% of households have access to some form of social protection, compared to 70% of households in Europe and Central Asia (World Bank, 2016).Item Ending Hunger Sustainably: BiodiversityLaborde, David; Murphy, Sophia; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin (2020)This paper is about biological diversity and agriculture. It is one of a series of papers written by the Ceres2030 project team on issues that are critical to the project’s overall ambition but that are complex and not easy to do justice to with the tools the project relies upon—namely, an economic cost model and syntheses of available published evidence on the effectiveness of agricultural interventions. For the economic cost model, there is a dearth of data about biodiversity, making the issue difficult to incorporate. On the evidence synthesis side, the published literature tends to highlight Ending Hunger Sustainably: Biodiversity2 knowledge gaps mostly focused on small-scale producers’ livelihoods and well-being. Biodiversity, as with many environmental dimensions of food systems, is not yet a well-integrated dimension in interventions to end hunger and raise agricultural productivity.Item Ending Hunger Sustainably: Climate change adaptation and resilienceLaborde, David; Murphy, Sophia; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin (2020)The achievement of the 2030 Agenda will require policy interventions that maximize the synergies available across the many goals and targets while limiting the inevitable trade-offs. Climate change will have consequences for each goal and sub-goal in the 2030 Agenda. Effective policy-making will consider climate adaptation interventions that, if successful, will strengthen the likelihood of achieving the 2030 Agenda more broadly. Box 1 shows the three targets of the Ceres2030 project (all from SDG 2) and describes interventions that will contribute to both the target and to climate adaptation. Of course, climate change will impose costs on achieving the SDG targets, due to the damage it is doing (a cost of not acting to mitigate climate change sooner), and to the necessity of introducing additional investments in targeted adaptation initiatives designed to prevent climate change effects from worsening (the cost of adaptation). The cost of climate adaptation has implications for the overall cost of meeting the SDG 2 targets and is therefore a cost of interest to Ceres2030.Item Ending Hunger Sustainably: Trends in official development assistance (ODA) spending for agricultureEber Rose, Mali; Laborde, David; Murphy, Sophia (2020-12)This briefing note offers an overview of the trends in official financial disbursements to agriculture for the period 2002–2018.1 It offers an illustrative analysis of the types of exploration into public funding for development that can be conducted using a database maintained by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1 All records of ODA extracted from the OECD CRS database (OECD, n.d.a). This analysis begins in 2002 because data relating to CRS disbursements prior to 2002 is not included in the database results table as the annual coverage is below 60% (OECD, n.d.e). Ending Hunger Sustainably: Trends in official development assistance (ODA) spending for agriculture2 (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC). Official development assistance (ODA) refers to resource flows, mostly monetary, that governments make available to other governments, generally coming from industrialized countries and given to developing countries. An understanding of recent trends in ODA spending, including the amounts involved, the recipients, and focus of the projects financed, puts into perspective the recommendations from the Ceres2030 project on how much—and how—to spend public funding for agriculture.Item Ending Hunger by 2030 – policy actions and costsSmaller, Carin; Laborde, David; Torero, Maximo; Chichaibelu, Bezawit Beyene; von Braun, Joachim (2020-10-12)The findings presented here are based on a set of comprehensive and long-term research programs and partnerships among a large international research community3 to identify high-impact, cost-effective interventions that can address the challenges of SDG 2 and the related targets. This policy brief builds on findings from two costing exercises: the marginal abatement cost curves (MACC) approach, and the computable general equilibrium (CGE) modelling approach. The purpose of the use of different research approaches and methodologies is to identify levels of coherence and consistencies of results that may lend credibility to proposed policy actions and investments. Conceptually, the two approaches have complementarities as both envision sustainable development, and both aim at one or more SDG2 core target (Box 1). Also, differences of findings between a modeling approach (that in this research is constrained by environmental targets and the doubling of incomes of smallscale producers), and using a Marginal Abatement Cost Curve approach (without capturing synergies or tradeoffs) are presented. As shown below, both approaches show results that are consistent.Item Mining the Gaps: Using Machine Learning To Map A Million Data Points from Agricultural Research From the Global SouthPorciello, Jaron (2021-11)Until recently, agricultural research and innovation has been largely focused on improving productivity, focused mainly on a small number of crops (Serraj & Pingali, 2018). While we’ve seen very high returns from this approach, we have also seen the unintended and negative consequences it can have on nutrition and diets, social inclusion, and the environment (Davidson, 2016; Webb & Kennedy, 2014). We are now witnessing a major shift in thinking about agriculture, one which puts agriculture in the larger context of a system with complex interactions between food production, processing, consumption, and climate change (Barrett et al., 2020). This same shift implies a need for rethinking the role of agricultural research and development efforts, and a push for innovations that go beyond productivity. There is a corresponding urgency to identify priority investments (Laborde et al., 2020; Reardon, Lu, et al., 2019). In order to do so, however, we must have an adequate and accessible evidence base on agricultural innovations and their potential in the context of a transformation (Herrero et al., 2020; Reardon, Echeverria, et al., 2019). And it has become increasingly clear that there are several gaps in evidence. This study looks at the summaries of more than 1.2 million past publications and uses these to assess the current landscape of research for the Global South using machine learning (Porciello, 2020).Item Ceres2030 technical note: Evidence synthesis, machine learning and partnershipPorciello, Jaron (Cornell University, 2020-07)Food systems are complex, and as problems change and evolve, so will our understanding of their root causes and effective solutions. As donors mobilize to meet the targets set by UN Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2): Zero Hunger by 2030, one of the most pervasive challenges they will face involves information: they need to know how much it will cost to fix these problems, what interventions have been researched, which are most effective in addressing them, and how those interventions will affect the rest of the economy. They must also be aware of potential synergies or trade-offs, where acting to achieve one objective can have strong impacts on achieving others, hampering attempts to establish a systematic approach to attaining the multiple objectives of SDG 2.Item A Systematic Scoping Review: How are farmers using digital services in low- and middle-income countries?Porciello, Jaron; Coggins, Sam; Otunda-Payne, Gabriella; Mabaya, Edward (2021-03)Whether we call it the fourth agricultural revolution, smart farming, precision agriculture or Agriculture 4.0, digital technologies are transforming farming. Mobile phones and other data-enabled services have increased access to information, knowledge, financial services, markets, and farm tools for millions of farmers worldwide. Small-scale producers use an array of digital tools, ranging from data-based crop management to mobile phone based banking. The goal of the Agriculture in the Digital Age scoping review is to capture, classify, and annotate—to the fullest degree possible—the research on digital interventions in agriculture, using peer-reviewed studies and other carefully selected sources, in order to help funding organizations determine priorities for further programming and research based on gaps in the evidence.Item Ending Hunger, Increasing Incomes, and Protecting the Climate: What would it cost donors?Laborde, David; Parent, Marie; Smaller, Carin (Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger, 2020-10-12)In response to the global commitment to rid the world of hunger, Ceres2030 partnered with Nature Research to answer two linked questions: First, what does the published evidence tell us about agricultural interventions that work, in particular to double the incomes of small-scale producers and to improve environmental outcomes for agriculture? And second, what will it cost governments to end hunger, double the incomes of small-scale producers, and protect the climate by 2030? The project focuses on three of the five targets in the second sustainable development goal (SDG 2, Zero Hunger) and looks at the public spending needed in low- and middle-income countries, including the contribution from donors through official development assistance (ODA) (Laborde et al., 2020). This report answers the second question. The answer to the first question is published as a special collection of Nature Research. This report is published alongside a complementary research project by the Centre for Development Research (ZEF) and the FAO that also identifies high-impact, cost-effective interventions to address the challenges of SDG 2. The use of different research approaches and methodologies helps to identify levels of coherence and strengthens the credibility of proposed policy actions and investments. The approaches show results that are consistent and compatible, confirming that between now and 2030 donors need to double their efforts (von Braun et al., 2020).1Item Ceres2030: Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger Summary ReportLaborde, David; Porciello, Jaron; Smaller, Carin; Murphy, Sophia; Parent, Marie (Ceres2030, 2020-10-12)"Governments have 10 years to take back control of their bold agenda. Ceres2030 was an experiment designed to help with the challenge. The project team, employing a complex and rigorous economic model and cutting-edge machine-learning tools, made a partnership with Nature Research that focused on answers to two linked questions: First, what does the published evidence tell us about agricultural interventions that work, in particular to double the incomes of small-scale producers and to improve environmental outcomes for agriculture? And second, what will it cost governments to end hunger, double the incomes of small-scale producers, and protect the climate by 2030? The project focuses on three of the five targets in the second sustainable development goal (SDG 2) and looks at the public spending needed in low- and middle-income countries, including the contribution from donors through official development assistance (ODA).Item Finding What Works to End Hunger: Finding and Synthesizing the LiteraturePorciello, Jaron; Murphy, Sophia; Smaller, Carin; Laborde, David (Working Paper, 2019)Item What would it cost to avert the COVID-19 hunger crisis?Laborde, David; Smaller, Carin; Porciello, Jaron (2020-06)An additional USD 10 billion is urgently needed to prevent millions more people becoming food insecure as a result of COVID-19. USD 5 billion of this must come from donor governments as aid, with the rest provided by developing countries themselves. Without funding for social protection programmes providing food or money to people in developing countries, decades of progress in tackling hunger could be wiped out by the end of this year, with longstanding consequences.Item A Global Value Chain of Knowledge to End Hunger SustainablyPorciello, Jaron; Laborde, David; Murphy, Sophia; Smaller, Carin (2020-07-09)The UN 2030 Agenda commits governments to evidence-based decision-making (UN General Assembly, 2015). This approach requires efforts to find and catalogue the evidence, then developing methods to analyze and synthesize it. It also means understanding the feasibility of whichever interventions the government identifies, taking into account the policy landscape in which the decision-maker operates. Policy interventions require political support among competing interests in the context of meeting both short- and long-term objectives. Motivated by the need to support tools for evidence-based policy-making, three partner organizations—Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)—formed a three-year partnership in 2018 called Ceres2030:Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is designed to support global development donors to increase the amount and improve the efcacy of their investment of public funds in improving food security and sustainability outcomes