The 2014 Global Hunger Index (GHI) report—the ninth in an annual series—presents a multidimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger. It shows that the world has made progress in reducing hunger since 1990, but still has far to go, with levels of hunger remaining “alarming” or “extremely alarming” in 16 countries. This year’s report focuses on a critical aspect of hunger that is often overlooked: hidden hunger. Also known as micronutrient deficiency, hidden hunger affects more than an estimated 2 billion people globally.

This case study addresses the issues of institutional change and the need for collective action in a commodity, tea, which requires high fixed investment in processing facilities. In the wake of political and economic changes, the case study illustrates how asset specificity and commodity characteristics facilitate vertical integration as discussed in Chapter 5 and how exogenous changes have influenced institutional arrangements and contract enforcement in the Malawian tea industry.

This study examines the implications of gender differences in wealth transfers—farmland and education—on the lifetime incomes of men and women in the rural areas of Ghana, the Philippines, and Sumatra. Based on household surveys of three generations, we tested the hypothesis that parents bequeath their wealth to their sons and daughters in accordance with their comparative advantages in lowland and upland farming and in nonfarm jobs.

The author tells us that Collective action occurs when more than one individual is required to contribute to an effort in order to achieve an outcome. People living in rural areas and using natural resources engage in collective action on a daily basis when they plant or harvest food together; use a common facility for marketing their products; maintain a local irrigation system or patrol a local forest to see that users are following rules; and meet to decide on rules related to all of the above.

Agricultural growth will prove essential for improving the welfare of the vast majority of Africa’s poor. Roughly 80 percent of the continent’s poor live in rural areas, and even those who do not will depend heavily on increasing agricultural productivity to lift them out of poverty. Seventy percent of all Africans— and nearly 90 percent of the poor—work primarily in agriculture. As consumers, all of Africa’s poor—both urban and rural—count heavily on the efficiency of the continent’s farmers.

"In this paper we present the findings of a qualitative investigation into some dimensions and implications of policy volatility in the realms of natural resource (NR) governance and devolution in contemporary Sudan, with particular reference to Greater Kordofan. Our goal is to map out some aspects of the interplay between volatility, disempowerment processes affecting both state agents and the rural population, and certain problems of governance that are characteristic but not unique to Sudan.

"Despite the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which brought to an end 20 years of civil war in the Sudan, this country continues to experience smaller-scale conflicts, particularly around access to and control of natural resources. Some observers lay the blame for this on ethnopolitical or tribal divisions. However, this paper argues that there are a variety of factors at play behind these conflicts, notably the combination of resource scarcity with a crisis of governance that is particularly evident in transitional areas like the Kordofan region.

This research report examines three questions that are central to IFPRI research: How do property-rights institutions affect efficiency and equity? How are resources allocated within households? Why does this matter from a policy perspective? As part of a larger multicountry study on property rights to land and trees, this study focuses on the evolution from customary land tenure with communal ownership toward individualized rights, and how this shift affects women and men differently.This study’s key contribution is its multilevel econometric analysis of efficiency and equity issues.

Policies to devolve responsibility for natural resource management to local bodies have become widespread in the past 20 years. Although the theoretical advantages of user management have been convincing and the impetus for devolution policies strong, the actual outcomes of devolution programs in various sectors and countries have been mixed.

Community-based Natural Resource Management (NRM) is increasingly becoming an important approach for addressing natural resource degradation in low income countries. This study analyzes the determinants of enactment, awareness of and compliance with by-laws related to Natural Resource Management (NRM) in order to draw policy implications that could be used to increase the effectiveness of by-laws in managing natural resources sustainably. We found a strong association between awareness and compliance with NRM bylaws.