The Declaration on Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Systems, and Climate Action endorsed by over 150 countries at UNFCCC-COP28 highlights global recognition of the unprecedented adverse climate impacts on food systems resilience and the need to expedite the integration of agriculture and food systems into climate action. While integration is necessary to ensure favorable sectoral level climate action outcomes, there are currently no concrete frameworks and case studies showcasing how to support this integration process at the country level. A recent study focused on Tajikistan uses a conceptual framework to undertake such an integration analysis of key national level climate change related and agriculture policy documents. It identifies synergies and existing gaps and provides recommendations on strengthening sectoral integration to achieve climate change goals. This study was funded by the USAID mission in Tajikistan and USAID’s Comprehensive Action for Climate Change Initiative (CACCI)-Asia under their support to the Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP) of Tajikistan toward the implementation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) through technical support from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

After experiencing significant negative external shocks beginning in late 2014, the Central Asian countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—began to enjoy more favorable external economic conditions in late 2016. Improvements include considerable increases in nonrenewable commodity prices and economic recovery in the region’s key trading partners, including resumption of growth in Russia, a key driver of remittance flows and trade for Central Asian economies.1 These favorable external factors increase economic activity and food security in Central Asia through their impact on export earnings, remittance flows, and investments from the region’s main economic partners.

Climate change and increased frequency of abnormal weather are becoming growing threats to people’s livelihood, including in Central Asia. These threats are particularly challenging in Tajikistan, the poorest country in the Central Asia region. Despite the fact that migration is prevalent and remittances account for a significant share of GDP, evidence is scarce as to whether the decision to migrate is driven by weather shocks, whether migration is used as mitigating tool against adverse weather shocks, and how much of the loss in welfare is actually mitigated by such migration. This study aims to narrow this knowledge gap by providing evidence based on a unique panel dataset from one of the poorest and agriculturally dependent regions in Tajikistan (Khatlon province), combined with a detailed set of various climate data. In doing so, we apply a novel approach through the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) to identify key weather shock variables among a vast set of potential variables associated with outmigration decisions in different districts. Our results show that different types of weather shocks are associated with outmigration decisions in different districts within the province, ranging from rainfall, temperatures, drought, and windspeed in different subperiods throughout the year. Regardless, more abnormal weather is almost universally associated with more outmigration, and outmigration significantly mitigates the potentially adverse effects on household consumption and food/nutrition security in the origin households. However, more abnormal weather in the origin location is also associated with reduced remittances per month per migrant sent to the origin location. Thus, the capacity of migration to mitigate against weather shocks is still limited. Combined with migration policies that increase net earnings during migration, supplementary support to enhance climate resilience in home locations, such as climate-smart agriculture and development of the non-farm sector, remains critical.

Economic resilience within the agrifood system is becoming increasingly crucial for assuring sustainable development. This is particularly so in regions with volatile and fragile environments, including Central Asia. Evidence remains scarce regarding what factors can enhance the economic resilience of agents within the agrifood system, including the resilience of productivity and technical efficiency. We partly fill this knowledge gap using the unique panel datasets of farm enterprises in Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, collected in 2019 and 2022, during which these enterprises experienced significant economic shocks in input prices. Using novel methods that combine Inverse Probability Weighting and panel stochastic frontier analyses models, we show that farmers who received more agricultural training and who had been granted greater autonomy in their production decisions in 2018 experienced greater resilience in technical efficiency despite the need to reduce the use of chemical fertilizer and oil/diesel in response to their price surges. Our findings suggest that providing critical public goods like information (related to training) and enabling environment (related to decision-making autonomy) can potentially enhance the resilience in the technical efficiency of farm enterprises. Furthermore, with chemical fertilizer and oil/diesel being potentially environmentally harmful inputs, these farmers also indirectly demonstrated resilience toward environmental sustainability.

Agriculture in Central Asia is vulnerable to climate change due to rising aridity, declining availability of water resources for irrigation, and low adaptive capacity. We use climate data from CMIP5 with RCP8.5 for greenhouse gas emissions and the DSSAT crop model to investigate how yields of key crops in Central Asia will be affected by climate change. We distinguish changes in yields between spring and winter plantings, between irrigated and rainfed crops, and between crops grown with high and low amounts of fertilizer. The results suggest that countries (and areas within countries) that either have moderate summers or grow a number of crops in a relatively cold winter will benefit from climate change, while countries that grow many of the crops in the summer will experience losses.

In Tajikistan, the poorest country in the Central Asia region and one of the poorest in the world, food consumption patterns remain inadequate for a significant share of the population. Undernutrition and child stunting, among other outcomes, remain prevalent. At the same time, overnutrition and obesity are becoming increasingly serious. Using pooled cross-section datasets collected in 2007 and 2015 from farm households in Khatlon province (the major agricultural area in Tajikistan), we investigate how key agricultural production practices (APPs) (household-level production diversification, land productivity, and production scale) are associated with household-level and individual-level nutritional outcomes, including dietary diversity and children’s and women’s anthropometric outcomes. We find that, in rural Khatlon, these APPs are positively associated with various nutritional outcomes at the household level. Furthermore, applying the methodologies of Lee (1979), Maddala (1983), and Björklund and Moffitt (1987), we find that a different set of factors affects the unobserved returns and costs of these APPs, which are heterogeneous across households, and that, importantly, adoption of these APPs is partly driven by the expected returns. However, despite the positive gross returns, diversifying farm production or raising land productivity is costly among small and resource-poor farms. Improving their access to land and agricultural capital, as well as improving overall land productivity, with particular support to women, may be critical for enhancing their nutritional outcomes by exploiting agriculture’s linkages to such outcomes.

This 2013 Global Food Policy Report is the third in an annual series that provides an in-depth look at major food policy developments and events. Initiated in response to resurgent interest in food and nutrition security, the series offers a yearly overview of the food policy developments that have contributed to or hindered progress in achieving food and nutrition security. It reviews what happened in food policy and why, examines key challenges and opportunities, shares new evidence and knowledge, and highlights emerging issues.

The extent of market integration and transmission of food price shocks is a major determinant of price stability and overall food security, particularly in developing countries. Few studies have examined these issues for countries in Central Asia, however. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining wheat market integration and price transmission in Tajikistan, the most food-insecure country in Central Asia. In particular, in this study we measure how well wheat market prices in Tajikistan are integrated with international and regional markets, as well as domestically with each other. Subsequently, we assess the nature of price transmission between these markets. Using horizontal price transmission analysis and asymmetric price relationships, a.k.a. rockets and feathers, we demonstrate how prices change in peripheral food-shortage markets compared to markets located in zones with abundant local production.

Nutrition-sensitive agricultural diversification continues to receive interest among developing country stakeholders as a viable option for achieving dual goals of poverty reduction and food/nutrition security improvements. Assessing the effectiveness of this strategy is also essential in countries like Tajikistan. We attempt to enrich the evidence base in this regard. We assess the linkages between household-level agricultural diversification and dietary diversity (both household- and individual-levels) using unique panel samples of households and individual women of reproductive ages in the Khatlon province. Using difference-in-difference propensity-score methods and panel fixed-effects instrumental variable regressions, we show that higher agricultural diversification together with greater overall production per worker and land at the household level leads to higher dietary diversity, particularly in areas with poor food market access. Typology analyses and crop-specific analyses suggest that vegetables, fruits, legumes/nuts/seeds, dairy products and eggs are particularly important commodities for which a farmer’s own production contributes to dietary diversity improvement. Furthermore, decomposition exercises within the subsistence farming framework suggest that nutritional returns and costs of agricultural diversification vary across households, and expected nutritional returns may be partly driving the adoption of agricultural diversification. In other words, households’ decisions to diversify agriculture may be partly driven by potential nutritional benefits associated with enhanced direct on-farm access to diverse food items rather than farm income growth alone. Our findings underscore the importance of supporting household farm diversification in Tajikistan to support improved nutrition intake, especially among those living in remote areas. In a low-income setting with limited local employment opportunities that is vulnerable to a wide range of external shocks, this will likely continue to be one of the most straightforward and realistic paths to improving household’s nutrition resilience.

At COP28 countries recognized that unprecedented adverse climate impacts are increasingly threatening the resilience of agriculture and food systems and ability to produce and access food in the prevailing scenario of mounting hunger, malnutrition, and economic stresses. As a result, over 150 countries have signed the Declaration On Sustainable Agriculture, Resilient Food Sys tems, And Climate Action committing to expedite the integration of agriculture and food systems into climate action and, simultaneously, to mainstream climate action across our policy agendas and actions related to agriculture and food systems (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), 2023). Currently, there is no concrete framework and approach available at the country level on how to support this integration process. Thus, in this paper, we are proposing a conceptual framework to undertake such an integration analysis of key national level climate change related and agri culture policy documents. Using Tajikistan as a case study, we identify synergies and existing gaps and provide recommendations on strengthening sectoral integration to achieve climate change goals. In the year 2022, 55 percent (402 million) of the people in the world affected by hunger, were living in Asia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of people who could not afford a healthy diet increased globally, and significantly in Asia. Unemployment, high incidence of climate shocks, poverty, income inequality, food price inflation, and the decline in foreign currency re serves have engendered the lack of affordability healthy diet (Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) et al 2023).