Large-scale food fortification (LSFF) is considered one of the most cost-effective ways of addressing micronutrient deficiencies. The intervention involves adding essential minerals and vitamins to widely consumed foods and requires minimal changes to consumption patterns while relying on existing food delivery systems. However, there is a lot of variability across countries in the adoption of mandatory and voluntary LSFF standards, that is, the government legislation requiring that specific staple foods or condiments be fortified. In fact, there are more than 80 countries where micronutrient deficiencies are widespread but a mandatory fortification standard has not been adopted. Even in countries where standards have been adopted, implementation could not be financially sustained over the years or laboratory tests revealed that designated food vehicles lacked the stipulated micronutrients. The Political Economy Diagnostic for Assessing Large-Scale Food Fortification (PEDAL) is designed to identify the ways in which political and institutional factors may contribute to differences in the uptake and implementation of LSFF standards. While political economy is acknowledged to be an important factor underlying the success or failure of LSFF, few studies on LSFF explicitly incorporate it into their analyses. By reducing LSFF to a purely technical intervention, bottlenecks to policy traction can worsen and derail uptake. In contrast, PEDAL offers a systematic diagnostic of the political economy environment for LSFF to identify these bottlenecks ex ante and to calibrate policy interventions accordingly. In doing so, PEDAL aims to help countries advance toward achieving healthier diets and reducing micronutrient deficiencies. PEDAL focuses on two core elements of the enabling environment: political will and implementation capacity (see Figure 1). Political will consists of the range of interests that motivate different stakeholders, the ideational goals that underlie their policy preferences, and their degree of leverage to exert their preferences. Implementation capacity consists of both the institutional architecture established to make continuous decisions related to LSFF policy and the technical capacity to ensure regulations are adhered to at the processing and retail levels. Across both dimensions, the diagnostic examines three sets of actors: the public sector (including government ministries, agencies, executives, legislators, and bureaucrats), the private sector (such as food producers, processors, and retailers) and civil society (including consumers, research institutes, universities, journalists, and nongovernmental organizations). The remainder of this brief examines these components in more detail and highlights how they can be assessed by researchers and practitioners.

An overarching goal of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) has been to influence policy outcomes in ways that lead to agricultural transformation and economic inclusion. The technical quality of this research is well recognized (CAS Secretariat 2020). Yet, high-quality, rigorous research is not sufficient to achieve policy influence in any domain. Other factors may shape policy uptake — for instance, elections may alter policy priorities, ideological biases may hinder the acceptance of research findings, and vested interest groups may lobby against data-driven or evidence-informed recommendations. A political economy perspective allows for a more holistic and realistic understanding of how policies are determined by governments and which pathways are more viable for achieving development outcomes through policy change.

Agricultural support policies cost more than US$800 billion per year in transfers to the farm sector worldwide. Support policies based on subsidies and trade barriers are highly distortive to markets and are also regressive as most support is provided to larger farmers. On balance, the incentives this support creates appear to increase greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. In addition, some subsidies undermine the production of more nutrient-dense commodities that are otherwise critical for the improvement of dietary outcomes. This paper first highlights that better outcomes could be achieved if even a small portion of agricultural subsidies were repurposed into investments in research and development (R&D) dedicated to productivity-enhancing and emission-reducing technologies. This would create multiple wins — mitigating global climate change, reducing poverty, increasing food security, and improving nutrition. Nonetheless, the political economy challenges to doing so are sizeable. Because current support policies are often politically popular and serve well-organized interests, reform is difficult without committed political leadership and multilateral collaboration. Using several case studies of both successful and failed changes of agricultural support policies in China, India, and the EU and the United States, we highlight lessons learned about the political economy constraints on and possibilities for reform.

For two decades, there have been ongoing efforts at harmonizing large-scale food fortification (LSFF) policies and procedures in West Africa. Despite some notable successes, micronutrient deficiencies in the region remain elevated. To identify which bottlenecks exist towards greater harmonization on LSFF, this study adopted a political economy perspective to consider areas of contention over interests, ideas, and institutions between domestic stakeholders, across countries, and within regional bodies. The study finds that West African governments have made impressive strides with harmonizing their LSFF standards and committing to the importance of fortification as one of several instruments for improving micronutrient deficiencies. Likewise, the donor and technical community have worked closely with the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA), the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), as well as specialized institutions of ECOWAS, such as the West African Health Organization (WAHO), to advance the LSFF agenda, support the private sector and national fortification alliances, and identify new food vehicles for fortification. At the same time, incoherent trade, tax, and macroeconomic policies in a context of multiple shocks and crises, protectionist impulses aimed at building up domestic agro-industries, lack of financial commitment to LSFF structures in the absence of donor support, and uneven financial contributions to ECOWAS and WAHO remain barriers to progress. Learning from these lessons and considering how to address LSFF from a holistic perspective that accounts for West Africa’s unique demographic, economic, and political characteristics will not only benefit extant harmonization efforts in ECOWAS but also help with broader continental alignment on fortification under the African Union’s 2025-2036 food and nutrition security strategy.

Since the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, heads of state and ministers at global convenings have repeatedly expressed commitments in support of achieving SDG2 — Zero Hunger — by 2030. Yet progress toward SDG2 has stalled, owing to economic slowdowns, unforeseen crises, geopolitical conflict, and lackluster investment in agricultural productivity and open trade. Where have commitments to SDG2 fallen short? While SDG2 calls for ending global hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition by 2030, this brief predominantly focuses on progress and commitments related to hunger and food insecurity. Drawing on the results of two recent studies, the policy brief (1) discusses trends and setbacks toward reducing hunger and food insecurity, (2) analyzes progress on the “means of implementation,” or mix of finances, technology, and policy choices, to address SDG2, (3) assesses 107 commitment statements in support of SDG2 made at 68 global meetings since 2015, and (4) explores how to improve accountability in the commitment-making process to accelerate progress toward Zero Hunger.

This study assesses the political economy of the conflict between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that brought out in April 2023, resulting in massive violence, displacement, and threats to food security. Based on a series of key informant interviews and other secondary materials, this study identifies that the primary underlying driver of the conflict relates to the rise of competition between the SAF and RSF over productive resources, including within the agri-food system. This scenario has been facilitated by a longstanding lack of scrutiny, accountability, and transparency over the distribution of economic rents and commercial holdings between the two factions. Additionally, the capture of rents from different industries and resources has been a key contributor to the geographic expansion of the conflict. As the conflict continues to rage between the two groups and their associates, it continues to impose considerable impacts on different actors within the agri-food system, posing significant challenges to the planting season and crop production, introducing blockades of trade routes, and a near cessation of agro-processing. We discuss these aspects of the ensuing conflict in view of the uncertainty about political and economic developments and propose policy recommendations for rebuilding Sudan’s agri-food system holistically under different scenarios.

Rapid urbanization in Africa south of the Sahara continues to highlight the importance of informal retailers as a source of both food and employment for the urban poor. The most recent Africa Agriculture Status Report emphasizes that, due to demographic and socioeconomic transformation in the region, the center of gravity of Africa’s food system is shifting to urban areas (AGRA, 2020). Informal retailers—including those who vend in open-air wet markets and hawk on pavements and streets—provide a critical link between agricultural producers and consumers. While the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically highlighted the vulnerability of this constituency (Resnick et al., 2020), informal traders have long been victims of other public health, economic, and climate shocks (Battersby & Watson, 2019). To build the resilience of informal traders and enhance their contributions to urban food security, fundamental governance issues need to be addressed. This brief synthesizes research on informal traders conducted under the “Economywide Factors Affecting Agricultural Growth and Rural Transformation” flagship of the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) led by IFPRI. The research spanned Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and Zambia and involved comparative analysis across capital cities based on media events data, surveys with traders, and interviews with urban bureaucrats. In this way, traders’ experiences could be complemented with policymakers’ insights about bottlenecks and opportunities for reform.

Wheat flour and bread have played a central role in Sudan’s political economy throughout the country’s post-independence history. In 2019, increasing bread prices precipitated the protests that ousted the government of Omar al-Bashir. How has Sudan’s recent political transition and economic circumstances impacted distortions within the wheat value chain? What are the policy preferences of relevant stakeholders for improving the affordability of wheat products and the productivity of domestic wheat farmers? This paper addresses these questions by drawing on key informant interviews in Sudan and utilizing a political settlements approach, which captures the underlying distribution of power among elites and citizens. The post-revolution political settlement contains a much broader distribution of power shared between a civilian alliance movement and the military, each of which has distinct interests in the wheat value chain. The paper elucidates the preferences of different stakeholders to address policy distortions and discusses bottlenecks that need to be overcome for those options to be feasible. In doing so, the analysis reveals that, while the policy of subsidizing bread remains contentious, there are broader coalitions for interventions related to regulatory and monitoring reforms, improvements in domestic wheat procurement, enhanced agricultural investments, and targeted cash transfers to cushion subsidy reductions.

What are the political and institutional prerequisites for pursuing policies that contribute to structural transformation? This paper addresses this question by focusing on Ghana, which has achieved sustained economic growth in recent decades and is broadly lauded for its environment of political pluralism, respect for human rights, free and fair elections, and vocal civil society. Yet, despite these virtues, Ghana remains unable to achieve substantial structural transformation as identified as changes in economic productivity driven by value-added within sectors and shifts in the allocation of labor between sectors. This paper argues that Ghana is strongly democratic but plagued by weak state capacity, and these politico-institutional characteristics have shaped the economic policies pursued, including in the agricultural sector, and the resultant development trajectory. Specifically, three political economy factors have undermined Ghana’s ability to achieve substantive structural transformation since then. First, democracy has enabled a broader range of interest groups to permeate policymaking decisions, often resulting in policy backtracking and volatility as well as fiscal deficits around elections that, among other things, stifle credit access for domestic business through high interest rates. Secondly, public sector reforms were not pursued with the same vigor as macroeconomic reforms, meaning that the state has lacked the capacity typically necessary to identify winning industries or to actively facilitate the transition to higher value-added sectors. Thirdly, successive governments, regardless of party, have failed to actively invest in building strong, productive relationships with the private sector, which is a historical legacy of the strong distrust and alienation of the private sector that characterized previous government administrations.

The economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic — at the global, country, and household levels — are dramatic, plunging the world into a recession not experienced in more than a half century (World Bank 2020a). Unlike other recent global crises, such as the food price crisis (2007–2008) or the financial crisis (2008), the pandemic has affected businesses across all industries and sectors, from agriculture to manufacturing to tourism, services, and mining. At the same time, it is spurring new innovations in response to public health needs and technological advances. This policy brief uses data from the COVID-19 Policy Response (CPR) Portal to examine trends in how government COVID-19 response policies have hindered or promoted the private sector, as well as the private sector’s role in combatting the pandemic. Comparing these policies and responses can provide useful insights into best practices for balancing the twin goals of economic and public health during a crisis.