Other Agriculture Study

313 items available

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http://hdl.handle.net/10986/2199

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Guatemala: Food Smart Country Diagnostic

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-09-28) World Bank

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.
Chile’s Forests: A Pillar for Inclusive and Sustainable Development

(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-06-01) World Bank

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.
Chile’s Forests: A Pillar for Inclusive and Sustainable Development

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020) World Bank

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.
Building Aruba’s Food Security during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond

(Washington, DC, 2020) World Bank

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.
Tapping the Potential of Bolivia's Agriculture and Food Systems to Support Inclusive and Sustainable Growth

(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-06) World Bank

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.
Gaining Momentum in Peruvian Agriculture: Opportunities to Increase Productivity and Enhance Competitiveness

(World Bank, Lima, 2017-12) World Bank

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.
Rapid and Integrated Agriculture Risk Management Review for Brazil: Towards an Integrated Vision

(World Bank, Brasilia, 2017) World Bank

The agriculture sector of Brazil faces a large number of risks linked to the productive process, which has led to substantial losses to the country in the past years. An adequate and integrated management of those risks can leave farmer incomes less exposed to losses, benefiting the sector and the country as a whole. Therefore, given the always-present resource limitation, it is important to maximize the economic returns of agriculture risk management actions. Brazil built important agriculture risk management policies and programs, but there are several signs that it is possible to improve their efficiency of effectiveness with more coordination and a prioritization in the treatment of gaps and opportunities. The objective of this work was to undertake a rapid and integrated review of agriculture risk management in Brazil, identifying gaps and opportunities for improving current public policies and programs at the federal level in the short and long term. Beyond potential improvements in specific agriculture risk management policies and programs, an improved coordination and integration of current tools can reduce the risk profile of the sector. In this context, the World Bank, Brazilian Agriculture Research Company (Embrapa ) and Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply (MAPA) put forward a rapid and integrated review of agriculture risk management in Brazil. This rapid review suggests that actions that seek the implementation of an integrated agriculture risk management vision are supported by society at large and by the public sector’s interest. Finally, planning requires the need for a stable institutional framework, which calls for a national plan and an agriculture law, with at least a five-year horizon and that must consider not only the agriculture risk management issues, but also rural development ones.
Weather Data Grids for Agriculture Risk Management : The Case of Honduras and Guatemala

(Washington, DC, 2013-01) World Bank

One of the major constraints for the improvement of agricultural risk management in Central America, and in particular to the development of weather index-based insurance, is the availability of complete meteorological data. Limitations with the data are related to restrictions in weather station coverage (density), and problems with the quality (errors and gaps in the information) and availability of historical records. This paper evaluates the reconstruction of historical meteorological records with gridded datasets for Honduras and Guatemala1 using the methodology in Uribe Alcantara et al. (2009).The reconstruction with synthetic series is implemented by replacing missing observations with estimations from regular grids (or gridded analyses). The development of synthetic series proposed here will facilitate, among other potential uses, the implementation of risk analysis in insurance contracts where meteorological information is limited or incomplete. This paper is organized in four sections. Section one describes the conceptual approach and methods implemented for the evaluation of the data and the development of the gridded analysis. Section two describes the results of the implementation of the gridded analysis for Honduras and Guatemala. Section three provides a brief description of possible applications of the regular grids for the development of weather insurance contracts. Section four summarizes the main conclusions.
Agricultural Risk Management in the Caribbean : Lessons and Experiences, 2009-2012

(Washington, DC, 2012-10) World Bank

The purpose of this report is to summarize the main results and lessons learned during the implementation of the World Bank technical assistance (TA), which are valuable to the ongoing discussion on agricultural risk management in the region. The report is organized as follows. Section two summarizes the program risk management strategies, including initial objectives and final outcomes. In particular, it describes how these objectives change in order to respond to the countries' particular demands. Section three presents the methodology and basic principles applied in the four stages of the program implementation. Six country cases are summarized in section four with a complete description of final outputs and recommendations. Finally, section five presents the main conclusions and lessons learned.
El Salvador Country Land Assessment

(Washington, DC, 2012-06) World Bank

This study assesses the alignment of land use, land tenure, and land market outcomes in El Salvador with public policy aspirations in recent decades for efficient, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable development in both urban and rural spaces. In doing so the study indirectly gauges the effectiveness of land sector institutions in facilitating such developmental outcomes in agricultural production, urbanization, and forest management. Chapter 1 briefly reviews some of the prominent struggles over land in El Salvador and outlines the salient features of today's institutional framework for land governance. Chapter 2 asks the question, "How effective have public policy interventions, including the Agrarian Reform, been in reducing rural inequality and tenure insecurity?". Chapter 3 explores what has happened to the lands transferred to Agrarian Reform cooperatives under the last iterations of the Agrarian Reform. Chapter 4 asks the question, "How has land governance in El Salvador responded to the challenges of urban land supply in the last decade?". In Chapter 5 the extent to which urban spatial expansion in El Salvador has been occurring in an inclusive way is explored. Chapter 6 presents the findings of the original analyses of land use in relation to deforestation. Chapter 7 analyzes available land market data in three Departments, Ahuachapan, Santa Ana, and Sonsonate, to identify trends and land use dynamism in the first decade of this century. Chapter 8 looks at the study's empirical findings from a more integrated, cross-sectoral perspective so that their implications for public policy are better understood. The final Chapter of the study presents policy options for consideration by the Government of El Salvador and the country's civil society organizations in order to address the key challenges related to land tenure, land use, and territorial planning.