Food for All: International Organizations and the Transformation of Agriculture

Many developing countries are falling behind sustainable development goals: food and nutrition levels have deteriorated due to conflict, climate change, and the Covid pandemic, while global ambitions for achieving sustainable food security and adequate nutrition have increased. But what are the prospects of achieving sustainable, healthy food for all? What is the best response to concerns about growing differentiation among developing countries in terms of domestic agricultural and industrial performance? How have global institutions, established during the post-World War Two period, helped developing countries to deal with the past economic fallout of food, fuel, and financial crises?

Food for All explores how developments since these organizations were established have led to changes in the provision of international financial and technical assistance in support of the global food and agriculture system and how developing countries’ own efforts have helped transform them These developments, and the increase in the number of global actors, have expanded and complicated global governance, presenting both opportunities for as well as challenges to the improvement of food systems. This volume provides an analysis of the structure, coordination, and management of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the World Food Programme (WFP). It also looks at the World Bank, the largest international funder of policy advice and investment projects, and CGIAR, a leading funder of international agricultural research.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Uma Lele, Independent scholar, Manmohan Agarwal, Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries, New Delhi, Brian C. Baldwin, Independent scholar, Sambuddha Goswami, Independent scholar

Uma Lele (PhD, Cornell University) is a development economist with decades of experience in research, operations, policy analysis, and evaluation in the World Bank, universities, and international organizations. At the World Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, she led complex evaluations of the
Bank’s Forest Strategy (2002), meta-evaluation of the CGIAR (2003), and the World Bank’s global programs (2005). She has served on numerous advisory, expert, and award panels in international organizations, including the World Food Prize (1987-1994) and the MacArthur Foundation (1991-1995). She has
been recognized with numerous awards and is a President elect of the International Association of Agricultural Economists.

Manmohan Agarwal is Adjunct Senior Fellow at Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries, New Delhi, and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies, India. He was formerly the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at the Centre for Development Studies at
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, and Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He was a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) at Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, and previously worked at the World Bank and at the International Monetary Fund. His research
has focused on international economics and development economics, the role of the G20, South-South cooperation, and the international monetary system.

Brian C. Baldwin is a geographer and agricultural economist. He has worked with the UK’s DFID in Sri Lanka and Zambia, USAID, UNIDO, FAO, IFAD, the EU, and the private sector in South East Asia and Southern Africa. He led IFAD’s involvement in the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Debt Initiative
(HIPC DI) and IFAD’s harmonization and alignment initiatives under the Paris Declaration and Accra accords. He co-chaired the Global Donor Platform for Rural Development, chaired the Multilateral Development Bank working group on Management for Development Results, and was the IFAD representative at
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC). He continues to work as an evaluation and policy adviser with both the public and private sector.

Sambuddha Goswami is a researcher whose areas of study include data assembly and the analysis of metadata sets concerning structural transformation, productivity growth, food, agriculture, nutrition, water and forest management, poverty, health, gender, energy and the environment, global public
goods, external assistance, and partnerships. He has worked with the Agricultural Development Economics Division, as part of the FAO Statistics Division, to support the Technical Working Group on Measuring Food and Nutrition Security of the Food Security Information Network (FSIN) of FAO, WFP, and
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI); and at the World Bank (December 2015-June 2016) on the National Agricultural Higher Education Project (NAHEP) in India.