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Author: Researchers of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 18
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Book Description
Between April and October 2020, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Michigan State University (MSU), with support from the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) and the Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT), have undertaken analyses of secondary data combined with regular telephone surveys of actors at all stages of Myanmar’s agri-food system in order to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the system. These analyses show that the volume of agribusiness has slowed considerably in Myanmar since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. There is lower demand from farmers for agricultural inputs and mechanization services and lower volumes of produce traded, especially exports to neighboring countries whose borders are closed. All actors in the agri-food system are facing liquidity constraints and experiencing increased difficulties in both borrowing and recovering loans.
Author: Researchers of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 18
Get Book Here
Book Description
Between April and October 2020, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Michigan State University (MSU), with support from the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) and the Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT), have undertaken analyses of secondary data combined with regular telephone surveys of actors at all stages of Myanmar’s agri-food system in order to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the system. These analyses show that the volume of agribusiness has slowed considerably in Myanmar since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. There is lower demand from farmers for agricultural inputs and mechanization services and lower volumes of produce traded, especially exports to neighboring countries whose borders are closed. All actors in the agri-food system are facing liquidity constraints and experiencing increased difficulties in both borrowing and recovering loans.
Author: Masias, Ian
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 7
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Book Description
Traditional family owned retail shops are the backbone of Myanmar’s consumer market. As the final node in the grocery supply chain, they sell all types of dry foods, i.e., processed and packaged, condiments, snacks, and beverages to final consumers. To some extent, they also supply basic staple grains, i.e., rice and pulses; dairy products; eggs; kitchen crops; and tobacco and alcohol. About 85 percent of all consumer goods in Myanmar are sold through these shops. In the food and grocery sector, these retail outlets, including wet markets, account for 90 percent of all sales, with the other 10 percent accounted for by fast-growing supermarkets. Because of the importance of traditional retail outlets in the last mile delivery of a wide variety of foods to consumers, any challenges they encounter from the COVID-19 crisis and corresponding policy responses to contain the virus have important implications for the availability and affordability of food for final consumers. This policy note is the first in a series of reports presenting results from rounds of a telephone survey of a sample of owners or managers of food retail shops located in the two largest cities in Myanmar, Yangon and Mandalay. The phone surveys are designed to provide a better understanding of the effects of COVID-19 shocks on Myanmar’s agri-food marketing system through the perspective of small-scale food retailers in urban areas. This policy note focuses on the demand side and overall business effects of the COVID-19 crisis on these food retailers. Phone interviews were conducted with 426 retail shop owners or managers between 8 and 15 July 2020. Eighty percent of those surveyed were in Yangon, with the rest in Mandalay.
Author: Minten, Bart
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 12
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Book Description
It is feared that the COVID-19 pandemic will lead to widespread increases in global poverty and food insecurity and that these negative impacts will concentrate on the most vulnerable segments of the population (Swinnen and McDermott 2020). Although Myanmar, with one of the lowest COVID-19 infection rates in the world, has been spared the worst direct impacts of the disease, its economy remains highly vulnerable to the economic fallout of the contagion. A major contributor to increased food insecurity in Myanmar is the reduction of income among vulnerable populations (Diao et al. 2020), partly due to significant declines in remittances in the country (Diao and Wang 2020). In addition, disruptions to food marketing systems and changes in farm and consumer prices could also turn out to be major drivers of food insecurity. Changes in food markets – including supply of commodities and transport - and food and agricultural prices are an obvious concern to policy makers, given the importance of agricultural prices for the income of farmers and food prices for the purchasing power of consumers.
Author: Maredia, Mywish K.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 9
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Book Description
This is the second policy note in a series presenting results from rounds of a telephone survey of a sample of retail food shop owners or managers located in two cities in Myanmar – Yangon, the economic center of the country with 4.4 million inhabitants, and Mandalay, the second largest city with 1.1 million inhabitants. The phone surveys are designed to better understand the effects of COVID-19 shocks on Myanmar’s agri-food marketing system from the perspective of these smallscale urban food retailers. Their shops are an important outlet for final consumers to purchase a variety of consumer goods, including many types of processed and packaged dry foods, condiments, snacks, beverages, basic staple grains (i.e., rice and pulses), dairy products, eggs, kitchen crops, tobacco, and alcohol products. The COVID-19 economic crisis could bring dramatic changes to these retailers – not only on the demand side in terms of the food purchasing behaviors of consumers, but also on the supply side in terms of how the food supply chains upon which they rely function and how they respond to these changes. This policy note builds on the analysis of the firstround of the survey, which focused on the demand side and overall business effects of COVID-19, by adding detailed questions on three additional themes – supplier options, credit extended and received by retailers, and the use of modern technologies and practices.
Author: Headey, Derek D.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 28
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Book Description
Myanmar had one of the lowest confirmed COVID-19 caseloads in the world in mid-2020 and was one of the few developing countries not projected to go into economic recession. However, macroeconomic projections are likely to be a poor guide to individual and household welfare in a fast-moving crisis that has involved disruption to an unusually wide range of sectors and livelihoods. To explore the impacts of COVID-19 disruptions on household poverty and coping strategies, as well as maternal food insecurity experiences, this study used a telephone survey conducted in June and July 2020 covering 2,017 mothers of nutritionally vulnerable young children in urban Yangon and rural villages of Myanmar’s Dry Zone. Stratifying results by location, livelihoods, and asset-levels, and using retrospective questions on pre-COVID-19 incomes and various COVID-19 impacts, we find that the vast majority of households have been adversely affected from loss of income and employment. Over three-quarters cite income/job losses as the main impact of COVID-19 – median incomes declined by one third and $1.90/day income-based poverty rose by around 27 percentage points between January and June 2020. Falling into poverty was most strongly associated with loss of employment (including migrant employment), but also with recent childbirth. The poor commonly coped with income losses through taking loans/credit, while better-off households drew down on savings and reduced non-food expenditures. Self-reported food insecurity experiences were much more common in the urban sample than in the rural sample, even though income-based and asset-based poverty were more prevalent in rural areas. In urban areas, around one quarter of respondents were worried about food quantities and quality, and around 10 percent stated that there were times when they had run out of food or gone hungry. Respondents who stated that their household had lost income or experienced food supply problems due to COVID-19 were more likely to report a variety of different food insecurity experiences. These results raise the concern that the welfare impacts of the COVID-19 crisis are much more serious and widespread than macroeconomic projections would suggest. Loss of employment and casual labor are major drivers of increasing poverty. Consequently, economic recovery strategies must emphasize job creation to revitalize damaged livelihoods. However, a strengthened social protection strategy should also be a critical component of economic recovery to prevent adversely affected households from falling into poverty traps and to avert the worst forms of food insecurity and malnutrition, particularly among households with pregnant women and young children. The recent second wave of COVID-19 infections in Myanmar from mid-August onwards makes the expansion of social protection even more imperative.
Author: Goeb, Joseph
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 23
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Book Description
Many governments imposed stringent lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic as a public health measure to suppress the spread of the disease. With consumer incomes already depressed, the potential impacts of these measures on urban food prices are of particular concern. This working paper examines the changes in Myanmar’s urban food prices during lockdown using detailed food price data collected from a panel of phone surveys conducted in August and September 2020 of 431 family-owned retail shops in Myanmar’s two largest cities, Yangon and Mandalay. We find that the supply side of Myanmar’s food retail sector was largely resilient to the shocks and lockdowns throughout the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Estimates from a fixed effects differencein-differences model reveal that food prices were 3 percent higher in townships under lockdown compared to those not under lockdown, a statistically significant but modest effect. Lockdowns had smaller effects on prices for highly processed food items sourced directly from companies, but larger effects on prices for raw or lightly processed commodities sourced through wholesale markets, which comprise a larger share of urban consumer’s diets. Retailer margins did not change significantly under lockdown restrictions, suggesting no evidence of price gouging. Overall, our findings of a modest impact of the lockdown on urban food prices underscore the importance of keeping the food supply chain–including wholesale markets and retail shops–functioning as completely and as safely as possible during times of crisis, as was mostly the case early in the crisis for the two cities in this study.
Author: Abay, Kibrom A.
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 46
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Book Description
We assess the impact of Ethiopia’s flagship social protection program, the Productive Safety Net Program (PSNP) on the adverse impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on food and nutrition security of households, mothers, and children. We use both pre-pandemic in-person household survey data and a post-pandemic phone survey. Two thirds of our respondents reported that their incomes had fallen after the pandemic began and almost half reported that their ability to satisfy their food needs had worsened. Employing a household fixed effects difference-in-difference approach, we find that the household food insecurity increased by 11.7 percentage points and the size of the food gap by 0.47 months in the aftermath of the onset of the pandemic. Participation in the PSNP offsets virtually all of this adverse change; the likelihood of becoming food insecure increased by only 2.4 percentage points for PSNP households and the duration of the food gap increased by only 0.13 months. The protective role of PSNP is greater for poorer households and those living in remote areas. Results are robust to definitions of PSNP participation, different estimators and how we account for the non-randomness of mobile phone ownership. PSNP households were less likely to reduce expenditures on health and education by 7.7 percentage points and were less likely to reduce expenditures on agricultural inputs by 13 percentage points. By contrast, mothers’ and children’s diets changed little, despite some changes in the composition of diets with consumption of animal source foods declining significantly.
Author: McDermott, John
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN: 0896294226
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
Two years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health, economic, and social disruptions caused by this global crisis continue to evolve. The impacts of the pandemic are likely to endure for years to come, with poor, marginalized, and vulnerable groups the most affected. In COVID-19 & Global Food Security: Two Years Later, the editors bring together contributions from new IFPRI research, blogs, and the CGIAR COVID-19 Hub to examine the pandemic’s effects on poverty, food security, nutrition, and health around the world. This volume presents key lessons learned on food security and food system resilience in 2020 and 2021 and assesses the effectiveness of policy responses to the crisis. Looking forward, the authors consider how the pandemic experience can inform both recovery and longer-term efforts to build more resilient food systems.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Food prices
Languages : en
Pages : 526
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Book Description
Author: Goeb, Joseph
Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 8
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Book Description
Agricultural input retailers play a key role in Myanmar’s agri-food system by supplying farmers with fertilizer, seed, pesticides, and other inputs necessary for successful harvests. Because farm-level input use is an important driver of yields for all major food crops, shocks from the COVID-19 crisis to the input retail sector have major implications for rural household welfare as well as food security. In this policy note, we present results and analysis on the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on agricultural input retailers from a five-round telephone panel survey of between 150 and 200 retailers in Shan, Kachin, Bago, Ayeyarwady, Sagaing, and Mandalay that was implemented every two weeks from mid-May to late July 2020. 1 The objective of this survey was to provide data and insights to the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, and Irrigation (MOALI) and agricultural sector stakeholders so that they better understand the nature of COVID-19 related shocks to Myanmar’s agricultural input retailers. Previous policy notes2 mostly focused on the survey rounds individually, tracking the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on agricultural input retailers as they were happening. In this note, we take a more comprehensive approach by looking back over all five survey rounds to understand how the effects of the COVID-19 crisis evolved over time. In particular, this note presents results from May 2020 through July 2020 across the five survey rounds on (i) disruptions caused by the COVID-19 crisis, (ii) responses to these disruptions, (iii) sales of fertilizer, maize seed, vegetable seed, and pesticides, and (iv) input retailers’ employees and hired labor.
