Agri-food production remains vital to the economies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Food systems are rapidly changing and are driven by income growth, (urban) population growth, shifts in dietary preferences, and agricultural productivity growth. Food systems are also under threat from disrupters like climate change and distorting policies (including trade wars). This paper makes two quantitative, forward-looking assessments for the future of food and agriculture in the LAC region. The first focuses on the long-term prospects - given projected pathways for the main drivers and under the threat of climate change. The second focuses on current vulnerability of LACs agri-food system to short-term disrupters with special reference to impacts of global trade wars and the prospects for reducing that vulnerability. The implications are not uniform across the countries in the region, but vary greatly depending on economic and demographic size, contribution of the agricultural sector to national GDP, natural resource endowments, ecological and climatic characteristics, level of sophistication of rural and agrarian institutions, available technology, farm-size distribution and tenure systems. Policy interventions to address the challenges will need to consider those differences in initial conditions. The foresight assessments are built on IFPRI’s core global model frameworks, IMPACT and MIRAGRODEP. They allow to capture the complexity of agri-food system development and the scenario analysis helps quantify the relative importance of the drivers and disruptors of food system change, which in turn should be of essential to policymakers in setting priorities for steering towards sustainable and stable food systems capable of meeting twenty-first century challenges.

Two previous reports (Díaz Bonilla, Laborde and Piñeiro, 2021, and Diaz-Bonilla, Flores, Paz, Piñeiro, and Zandstra, 2021) covered the evolution and impacts of the pandemic on food systems in Guatemala until the time of their writing (which together covered from the start of the pandemic in early 2020 until about October 2021. This third report concludes the analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on food systems in Guatemala. It summarizes the previous reports and updates the analysis until the end of May 2022. However, this country and its food systems have also been affected by other events since the pandemic started in early 2020. Between 3 and 17 November 2020, tropical storms Eta and Iota hit Guatemalan territory with heavy rains that led to floods and mud landslides, affecting 16 of the country's 22 departments. Later, in 2021 the strong world economic rebound due to expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in the USA and many other developed and developing countries combined with persistent strains on value chains due to COVID19 to lead to increases in transportation costs and the prices of food, energy, and fertilizers. In the case of agricultural products, those increases were com-pounded by adverse climate events in some important producers, particularly in South America. Finally, the Russian-Ukraine Conflict (RUC) on February 24, 2022, has added further pressures on the prices of energy, fertilizers and food products including wheat and vegetable oils. Therefore, the pandemic's specific impact on Guatemala's food systems has been interacting with the other developments mentioned, making it very difficult to differentiate among them. Policymakers, how-ever, need to respond to the overall impact of the conditions affecting the population, whatever the leading causes may be. Therefore, this final report, while emphasizing those aspects linked to the pandemic, will discuss the conditions in Guatemala considering those other factors. This report is structured as follows. First, it summarizes the main policy responses, costs, and financing related to the COVID-19 shock. Second, it brings up to date the evolution of the pandemic, using different indicators. Third, it updates the evolution of key economic and nutritional variables. Fourth, there is a brief discussion of the implications of RUC for food systems.. Fifth, the report continues with a more specific analysis of the evolution of some food value chains that are central for food consumption in Guatemala. The next section discusses policy considerations for health, poverty and nutrition, and food value chains, based on the updated analysis of the previous sections, including cost and financial aspects. A final section concludes.

At the 1964 annual meeting of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Panama, Felipe Herrera, then the President of the institution, argued that Cour institution must continue to demonstrate that, being a bank, it is also more than a bank. What is this institution that had the backing of both Latin American countries and the United States, and that since Herrera many have claimed it is more than a bank? And how did it come into existence?

This study presents an economy-wide analysis for Guatemala, considering several tax options on sugar and SSB and then tracing their differentiated general economic effects. We focus on Guatemala, considering the increasing health burden imposed by obesity and the fact that it is also an important sugar producer and exporter. In the next section we describe the general conditions for sugar production and consumption in Guatemala. We then describe the economy-wide model utilized, the modeled scenarios, and finally, the results of the simulations before concluding.

Essays reprinted from IFPRI's 2002-2003 annual report

There have been important changes in the international trade of processed and high-value added food products from developing countries over the past several decades. One of them has been the emergence of oilseeds and fruits and vegetables, replacing traditional products such as sugar, coffee, and cocoa as the main exports from developing countries. Another trend has been the collapse of African agroindustrial exports and the increase of exports from Asia. The paper highlights key trends, and explores possible reasons for the trends, focusing on trade policies in less-developed countries (LDCs) and developed countries (DCs). The paper argues that national trade policies and other economic policies appear to have been relatively supportive of agroindustrial production and exports in Asia. In contrast, policies have had more mixed effects in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and seem to have been just one component in a larger array of forces inhibiting economic development in Africa. The performance of agroindustrial production and exports from LDCs may be now more dependent than ever on the completion of reforms in the agricultural trade policies of DCs. For Africa, however, a more supportive international environment and better macroeconomic and trade policies will not be enough to ensure a thriving agroindustrial sector within a broader process of economic development until military confrontations stop.

In the 1990s, policy debates focused on global price levels and whether they were too low. Two recent food price spikes, in 2008 and 2011, have led to renewed concerns about the impact of high prices and shifted the focus back to food price volatility. The effects of changes in price trends on food production and food consumption (a discussion about price levels) are different from the effects of volatility changes around those trends (cycles and extreme events), but the two issues are related. This paper argues that analysis of these developments may benefit from differentiating between trends, cycles, and shorter-term events, including spikes and busts. After expanding on several methodological and data issues related to how these concepts are defined and measured, the paper concludes that although the price shocks of 2008 and 2011 focused the attention of the public and policymakers on price volatility, the decomposition of trends, cycles, and shorter-term volatility also suggests the need to find out whether price variations are responding to cyclical and shorter-term movements, or whether they are the result of a changing trend reflecting adjustments in long-term fundamentals that need to be properly understood.