The issues of food security and agricultural competitiveness are central to agricultural and food policy making in the 21st century. Although developed and developing countries are at different stages of achieving food security and their agricultural competitiveness varies, they face a common and increasingly urgent challenge: feeding their growing populations with finite natural resources. The issues, constraints, and challenges related to competitiveness and food security have not been fully understood or studied in the context of policy making at the national and global levels.

The Government of Tajikistan should consider joining the Global Methane Commitment as a strategic and prudent decision. Tajikistan's participation in the Global Methane Pledge offers numerous benefits that can positively impact the country's economy, environment, and global reputation. By joining this international effort to reduce methane emissions, Tajikistan can contribute to global climate change mitigation goals, demonstrating its commitment to addressing environmental challenges. This commitment becomes particularly significant for Tajikistan's agrarian economy, where sustainable livestock management practices can help reduce methane emissions from enteric fermentation, enhancing both environmental sustainability and agricultural efficiency. Additionally, the pledge emphasizes improved waste management and methane capture from solid waste sites, aligning with Tajikistan's green energy objectives, carbon market participation, revenue generation, and attracting international investments. Importantly, joining the Global Methane Pledge involves no legal obligations or penalties, offering Tajikistan a flexible and supportive framework for collaboration, knowledge sharing, funding access, and effective methane reduction measures implementation. Targeting main sources of methane emissions provides an opportunity to implement cost effective measures that yield multiple benefits, including improved air quality, reduced health risks from air pollution, enhanced energy efficiency, increased energy security, and the development of sustainable technologies and industries that foster economic growth and job creation. It is recommended that comprehensive studies be undertaken within each of the sub-sectors such as agriculture, energy, waste management and wastewater management. These studies will not only provide valuable insights to inform effective interventions, but also provide a basis for future re search and data-driven decision-making. It is also important to highlight that some measures can lead to cost avoidance in the long run. By focusing on mitigating methane emissions, Tajikistan can actively contribute to global climate change mitigation while reaping numerous positive out comes for its environment, public health, and economy. To determine the effects of measures, effective measurement is needed. Tajikistan has been improving the management and use of statistical data in recent decades as its Agency for Statistics under the President of the Republic of Tajikistan (TajStat) works closely with regional and international partners to improve data quality and reporting. However, the agency needs additional human and financial resources to support the collection of climate data and the development of indicators to monitor progress and to support sound policy decisions.

Private sector agricultural extension has expanded rapidly in many developing countries in the wake of drastic funding cuts made to public extension systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Motivated by the increase in sales or contract farming revenues that extension can generate, private providers include seed and input companies, distributors and dealers, service providers, food processors and retailers, and mobile phone companies. Mixed public-private systems are now becoming common. How well can the private sector fill the gap left by dysfunctional public systems? Knowledge Driven Development: Private Extension and Global Lessons provides a critical assessment of the effectiveness of private extension systems in developing countries.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is perennially plagued by prolonged phases of poverty, conflict, and increased internal migration, as well as pandemic outbreaks such as Ebola and COVID-19, and limited livelihood opportunities. Such unexpected or catastrophic events have rendered households vulnerable and resulted in poor health outcomes. Given this background, we intend to analyze the nutritional profile of households for a period spanning almost a decade using the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES). We construct a composite nutrition deficiency index (NDI), capturing intake of 14 different macro- and micronutrients (which we refer to as dimensions)—namely, calories, protein, calcium, zinc, folate, thiamine, niacin, iron, vitamin A, vitamin B12, vitamin D, vitamin B6, vitamin C, and vitamin E—using the popular Alkire-Foster methodology. This methodology, usually used to construct multidimensional poverty indexes, in this case helps measure the incidence, intensity, and combined extent of multinutrient deprivation. DRC’s values on the multidimensional NDI vary regionally from 0.13 to 0.73. Urban DRC performs worse than rural DRC. Regions subject to the conflict and Ebola crises are the worst-affected of the nutritionally deprived regions. Deficiency in calorie and protein intake contributes to the highest values of the NDI, but we also find evidence of a double burden of malnutrition, with households lacking consumption of both macro- and micronutrients. South Kivu is the worst-performing of all regions and Mongala the best. The northern parts of DRC have fewer nutritionally deprived households, as compared with the central and southwestern parts. Our main policy recommendation is to help improve market access in urban areas so that people consume a more diverse diet. In rural areas, the government should support improving nutrition-sensitive agricultural production. Although the World Food Programme has a sustained presence in the country, uplifting households from severe hunger, active participation by the government and collaboration with multiple stakeholders is called for.

Although there is an increasing base of literature on extension and advisory services, their role in building resilience in particular has not yet been explored empirically. The literature on resilience in general is itself only in the nascent stage. However, past intervention efforts that attempt to move from emergency responses to long-term development indicate that without well-capacitated systems for implementing interventions, such a transition could be difficult. This brief explores the sustainable-livelihoods framework to conceptualize the capacity needs of resilience-focused extension and advisory services. It indicates where to move the policy and research agenda forward with regard to the role of extension and advisory services in building resilience.

Agricultural transformation and development are critical to the livelihoods of more than a billion small-scale farmers and other rural people in developing countries. Extension and advisory services play an important role in such transformation and can assist farmers with advice and information, brokering and facilitating innovations and relationships, and dealing with risks and disasters. Agricultural Extension: Global Status and Performance in Selected Countries provides a global overview of agricultural extension and advisory services, assesses and compares extension systems at the national and regional levels, examines the performance of extension approaches in a selected set of country cases, and shares lessons and policy insights. Drawing on both primary and secondary data, the book contributes to the literature on extension by applying a common and comprehensive framework — the “best-fit” approach — to assessments of extension systems, which allows for comparison across cases and geographies. Insights from the research support reforms — in governance, capacity, management, and advisory methods — to improve outcomes, enhance financial sustainability, and achieve greater scale. Agricultural Extension should be a valuable resource for policymakers, extension practitioners, and others concerned with agricultural development.

Climate change affects various stages of the food system including production, processing, distribution, and consumption. To cope with this vulnerability, many nations have engaged in a global movement to establish strategies aimed at food security. As in other countries, in the Republic of Korea climate change has had, and will continue to have, a significant influence on the food system, creating many uncertainties. In response, the Korean government and relevant agencies under national strategies have implemented various policy measures and programs to respond to the effects of climate change and strengthen the country’s food resiliency. In this paper we examine those strategies, measures, and specific programs, and in particular those that involve agricultural extension and technology dissemination. These various sector-specific or cross-sector strategies have not only counteracted climate change impacts but also improved the incomes of farming households, who have struggled with import competition and low profitability under Korea’s generally slowing economy. The Korean government has also implemented extension and tech dissemination projects in and with developing countries with the aim of building resilient food systems in the era of climate change. We find that such programs would benefit from the formation and maintenance of international networks, and moreover, each international program must be preceded by a thorough needs assessment that takes into account the regional context and each project should promote appropriate technologies-that is, technologies customized or particularly suited to the local context.

Capacity challenges thwart economic growth and development. Efforts to strengthen capacity can benefit from past lessons and documented best practices. This note uses IFPRI’s capacity-strengthening activities as an example to provide an overview of best practices for one of the key elements of capacity development: monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines capacity strengthening as the “process through which individuals, organizations, and societies obtain, strengthen, and maintain capabilities to set and achieve their own development objectives over time.”1 Using the UNDP definition, this note explains the concepts of monitoring and evaluation and outlines how to conduct M&E of capacity-strengthening activities, including how to assess inputs, outputs, outcomes, and impact at the individual, institutional, and system levels.

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).

Food systems face shocks varying in breadth and duration from a wide array of sources. These shocks can affect all aspects of a country’s food system, threatening the food security of its citizens. Low levels of capacity to address food system shocks are a major development challenge. This paper presents a conceptual framework for assessing the capacity of a food system to become more resilient, regardless of what kind of threat it faces. It suggests that food systems can be categorized into three subsystems: a policy system; markets, trade, and institutions; and a production system. Within each of these systems, three dimensions of capacity are analyzed: individual capacity, organizational capacity, and system capacity. The paper explores examples of building capacity within this framework and identifies key knowledge and research gaps. It also presents a typology as a possible tool for prioritizing investments in capacity building for resilience across countries.