Other Agriculture Study
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Publication
Integrating Venezuelan Migrants in Colombia’s Agri-Food Sector
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-12-11)By the end of August 2020, five years since the intensification of the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis, 5.2 million Venezuelans had fled their country, in an exodus whose scale and pace closely mirror those of the Syrian refugee crisis - where by 2015, four years into the forced displacement crisis, 4.8 million people had escaped Syria. In the immediate aftermath of the surge in the number of Venezuelan migrants, the focus of the Colombian government was to register all migrants and provide relief through health and welfare systems. This report is intended to reach a broad audience of policy makers, program administrators, development professionals, and academics in Colombia and in the broader development community, and aims to assesses the integration of Venezuelan migrants into Colombian agri-food labor markets through a combination of original micro-level data analysis and in-depth semi-structured field interviews with Venezuelan migrants, producers’ associations, and Colombian institutions. The main contributions of the study are three-fold. First, the report offers a detailed overview of Venezuelan migration into Colombia, spatially and over time, enriching with new, and more detailed, insights the currently available information on migrants’ employment outcomes and on their comparison to those of the local Colombian population. A second contribution of the report is to provide evidence that the agri-food sector in Colombia has a yet unfulfilled potential to support a smoother inclusion of Venezuelan migrants in the labor force. The third and final contribution of the report is to identify lessons learned for the inclusion of Venezuelan migrants in the agri-food sector in Colombia. The report concludes with a look at the path ahead, through practical ideas and operationalization principles for delivering a strategy that includes both supply and demand driven integration of migrants in labor markets, featuring agriculture and food systems more prominently. -
Publication
Future Foodscapes: Re-imagining Agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11)Agriculture and food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean Region (LAC) are rightfully recognized as among the most successful on the planet: they have fed a fast-growing population, facilitated economic development, enabled urbanization, generated substantial exports, and helped drive down global hunger and poverty. Yet despite these significant contributions, the public image of the region’s agriculture and food systems as dynamic, productive, and efficient reflectsonly part of a more complicated reality. The impressive achievements have come at the expense of significant environmental and health costs. LAC agriculture uses over one-third of the region’s land area, consumes nearly three-quarters of the region’s fresh water resources, and generates almost one-half of the region’s greenhouse gas emissions. And despite the consistent food production surpluses, millions of people in LAC regularly go hungry or suffer from malnutrition and related diseases. In short, the region’s successes in feeding the population and exporting food to the rest of the world are exacting high costs on people and on the environment. -
Publication
Guatemala: Food Smart Country Diagnostic
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09-28)The term food smart refers to a food system that is efficient, meets the food needs of a country, and is environmentally sustainable. Reducing food loss and waste (FLW) is one of the critical pillars to build a smart food system. This diagnostic focuses on the FLW pillar, from farm to fork to landfill, with the objective of alerting policymakers to the role that addressing food loss and waste can play in meeting their various global and national policycommitments. -
Publication
Chile’s Forests: A Pillar for Inclusive and Sustainable Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-06-01)The economic success of the Chilean forest sector relies heavily on its forest plantations, which are facing significant challenges. Plantations are intensively managed for pulp and other wood products for export. This commercial orientation has promoted voluntary forest management and chain of custody certification and the development and adoption of the Chilean Sustainable Forest Management Certification System (CERTFOR). However, as afforestation rates decline, overall production in forest plantations is falling, which can be explained by lower productivity and management effectiveness of small- and medium-sized forest plantations. Additional challenges include (a) the environmental impact of current management practices, and (b) the possibility of a wood deficit in the coming years. With the focus shifting away from plantations, Chile’s native forests have the potential to provide an increasing range of goods and services. Native forests are generally characterized by unsustainable management practices and thus are highly degraded, often only providing firewood. While considerable research on silvicultural techniques has been conducted, only small areas have adopted sustainable forest management practices, with a focus on thinning of second-growth forests and selective cuttings. However, native forests have the potential to revitalize regional and local economies through more sustainable management systems. For this resource to be sustainably utilized, it is essential to address challenges such as degradation, decapitalization, and poor development of the goods/services market that natural forests generate. Native forests have enormous resilience, and, over time, can recover and build more sustainable production systems, consequently increasing the supply of timber and nontimber resources, as well as biodiversity and other ecosystem services. -
Publication
Building Aruba’s Food Security during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond
(Washington, DC, 2020)A strong agriculture sector and food security system can diversify the economy and systematically strengthen national capacities to better manage risk and recovery from exogenous and endogenous shocks and enhance climate resilience. The severity of the COVID19 shock has created an opportunity to rethink economic strategy in ways that not only help manage risk but can provide the stimulus to investing in new ways to create sustainable jobs. These jobs can improve livelihoods and quality of life, the environment, and national cultural identity. A sustainable food security strategy in Aruba can be grounded in two pillars: i) commercial-scale food and agriculture based on a particular set of business expansions or start-ups that can function as viable and profitable food and agricultural businesses in the resource conditions presented, and ii) widespread microscale residential producers that are highly efficient users of land and water, incorporating climate-smart techniques and devices, and applying proven production techniques. Each pillar must consider different factor endowments for optimal production, including land, water, growing medium, technology, energy, labor and know-how, capital, and financial requirements, as well as a market opportunity. Strategic guidelines can steer the development of each pillar and the overall resilience of the agriculture sector. These include a strategic public communication campaign to increase local production, enhancing demand for local produce, enhancing quality standards for local produce, incentivizing experimentation in production, involving youth, pioneering innovative technologies, leveraging access to global research and resources through international partnerships, and continued analysis and assessment of production to better understand results. -
Publication
Chile’s Forests: A Pillar for Inclusive and Sustainable Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020)Since the beginning of the twentieth century, Chile embarked on a long journey to develop a forestry model adapted to its national circumstances, achieving considerable progress in the last four decades by significantly increasing its forest cover and developing a highly competitive industry with global reach, making forestry among the country’s main economic activities. Despite the significant achievements made in establishing a vast natural capital based of planted forests in the country, the forest sector faces new challenges. The effects of climate change with increasing temperatures and decreasing precipitation are accelerating desertification, land degradation and drought processes. Furthermore it is increasing the frequency and intensity of forest fires, affecting the quality of life of hundreds of thousands of people, the future availability of timber, and generating a variety of other impacts on the country's ecosystems. This new scenario also entails the need to strengthen, modernize and adapt the current institutional framework to enable it to more effectively support the continuous growth of the forest sector in the current national and global context, and continue generating economic, social and environmental benefits for the country. -
Publication
Tapping the Potential of Bolivia's Agriculture and Food Systems to Support Inclusive and Sustainable Growth
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06)Agriculture and the rural space will continue to demand the attention of policy makers in Bolivia for several reasons, even as urbanization gains momentum. First, agriculture is a proven engine of economic growth. Aside from showing its strength in decades past, in recent years agriculture shielded the Bolivian economy from the worst effects of the decline in other primary sectors, and in the future, healthy rates of agricultural growth will make the overall economy more diversified and more resilient. Second, a robust and dynamic agricultural sector will continue to curb dependence on the mining and gas sectors, while contributing significantly to inclusive growth, value addition, the creation of more and better jobs on and off of the farm, and better nutrition for all. Third, because agricultural growth in Bolivia has proven to be pro-poor, maintaining that growth is essential for continued reductions in poverty. Fourth, because climate and other shocks affecting agriculture can significantly disrupt steady gains in economic growth, poverty reduction, and food security, building a resilient agricultural sector is critical to sustain those gains. Finally, although policy makers will want to support agricultural growth, they will not want that growth to compromise the future for generations of Bolivians by squandering and degrading irreplaceable natural resources. -
Publication
Charcoal in Haiti: A National Assessment of Charcoal Production and Consumption Trends
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-11)A widely cited report from 1979 suggested that existing wood supplies in Haiti would be enough to meet increasing charcoal demand until around the year 2000, but that ongoing charcoal production could result in an environmental ‘apocalypse’ (Voltaire 1979, 21, 23) The prediction that wood supplies in Haiti would be exhausted by 2000 was also supported by a report on trends emerging from early remote sensing analyses of aerial photographs spanning from 1956 to 1978, for threedifferent locations in Haiti (Cohen 1984, v–iv). And yet, some 40 years later, Haitians continue to produce large quantities of charcoal despite these dire predictions to the contrary. The estimations and subsequent extrapolations presented here are conservative, using midrange estimates on a number of variables, including charcoal bag carrying capacities for different-sized vehicles in the classificatory typology, an average weight assumption for charcoal bags, and the utilization of annual extrapolation methods (for Port-au-Prince and all of Haiti) based on extending data sampled during representative low and peak periods of charcoal production to corresponding low and peak seasons across the entire year. This research provides targeted answers to a narrow set of research questions, helping to fill an important information gap in Haiti. Most notably, the total volume of charcoal moving into Port-au-Prince has implications on the total required volume of primary production of biomass for charcoal and the total value of the charcoal value chains, demonstrating the magnitude of importance of charcoal production for Haiti. These two up-to-date figures may inform policy decisions for development and government programming related to landscape management, reforestation, tree planting, agroforestry, and agricultural projects in Haiti. -
Publication
Gaining Momentum in Peruvian Agriculture: Opportunities to Increase Productivity and Enhance Competitiveness
(World Bank, Lima, 2017-12)What is the future for agriculture in Peru? Once the principal source of employment and income for much of the population, Peru’s agricultural sector has declined in importance as the national economy has grown and urbanized. Economic activity in the sector has continued to grow, but economic activity in other sectors has grown more rapidly, leaving agriculture to make up an ever smaller share of the overall economy. The future of Peruvian agriculture should concern policy makers, for at least five reasons. First, agriculture makes up an important part of the economy, so if agricultural growth decelerates, overall growth will suffer. Second, an expanding agricultural sector diversifies Peru’s economy and reduces dependence on extractives, so if the agricultural sector contracts relative to other sectors, economic growth could become more volatile. Third, agriculture-led growth is good for the poor, so if agricultural growth slows, an important means of reducing poverty will be lost. Fourth, Peru relies on food imports to make up production shortfalls, so if agricultural production fails to keep pace with population growth, national food security could be threatened. Fifth, climate-smart agricultural practices can play a major role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and sequestering carbon, so if future agricultural practices are not climate smart, an important opportunity to help mitigate climate change will be missed. This report synthesizes current knowledge about the ongoing transformation of Peru’s agriculture and food system, assesses the recent performance of the agriculture sector with an emphasis on productivity and competitiveness, and highlights opportunities for enhancing the future contribution of the agriculture sector toward meeting the country’s development challenges. -
Publication
Agriculture Productivity Growth in Brazil: Recent Trends and Future Prospects
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-09-24)The industrialization process in Brazil begun in the 1960s and intensified in the 1970s, however the expected productivity growth of the overall economy and structural transformation did not happen. Since the end of the 1970s, the Brazilian labor productivity has been lower than many similar economies, currently representing around one fourth of the average labor productivity in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. One of the reasons for the weak productivity performance of the Brazilian economy in the past decades has been the manufacturing sector. Between 2000-2013, agriculture productivity rose by 105.6 percent, compared to only 11.7 percent in the services sector and -5.5 percent in the manufacturing sector. This report will focus mainly on policies related to key production factors (such as human, physical, and natural capital) and agriculture policies. The motivation for this report is to explore the evolution and source of the strong agriculture productivity growth that has occurred in Brazil in recent decades, identifying opportunities and challenges for future development of the sector. The goal is to look for opportunities to accelerate agriculture productivity growth, to have an increased impact on sector growth, jobs, environmental sustainability, and poverty reduction, as well as potentially to shed light on lessons that can contribute to efforts to boost productivity in other sectors within Brazil. The report is divided into five sections. Section one give introduction; section two describes the evolution and sources of agriculture productivity growth in recent years; section three evaluates the contributions of different factors of production, such as natural, human, and physical capital; section four explores the opportunities for further maximizing agriculture growth in Brazil through increases in productivity; and section five presents conclusions and policy recommendations on how to further maximize agriculture productivity in Brazil while having positive social (poverty reduction and jobs) and environmental impacts.