Rico Ihle

SDG 2 ‘Zero Hunger’ has been a global commitment to ensure sufficient healthy food for all. Accounting for more than 40% of south‐east Asiaʼs population, several millions of Indonesians still face the risk of food insecurity despite of large improvements achieved. This article compares the progress made during the past decade to other ASEAN countries. It also explores the patterns and the changes of food security across Indonesiaʼs vast territory. We identify a gap in food security improvements at national level which has constantly been widening since 2019 and experienced a growth shortfall relative to the historical trend. We find a pronounced West‐East gradient in food security patterns across Indonesiaʼs 38 provinces which has been fairly stable since 2019. However, convergence of food security levels has barely taken place. Indonesiaʼs policies should ensure increased convergence of food security across its provinces and bring the country back to its stable pre‐Covid19 food security improvement trajectory.

Policy interest often focuses on specific instruments that effectively enhance household resilience to food security shocks. Based on microeconomic household demand and resilience theory, this paper investigates to what extent increased household resilience capacities result in household food consumption being more robust to adverse food price and income shocks. Using nationally representative household data from the Ghana Living Standards Survey, baseline parameters estimated from a micro‐econometric quadratic almost ideal demand system are used to simulate the impacts of income and price shocks on food demand of urban and rural non‐poor as well as urban and rural poor households. We assess how policy instruments that increase household resilience capacities, proxied by the values of assets owned, livestock, or household crop buffer stocks, affect shocks' impacts on food demand. Results show that a 20% general increase in food prices induces a demand switch from all other foods to basic staples and miscellaneous foods while a 20% reduction in available food expenditure dampens demand for pulses, greens, protein foods, and oils. Policy instruments that increase assets, livestock, and crop stocks of only poor households are more beneficial to the urban poor—increasing their demand for greens, protein foods, and oils—than policy instruments that raise resilience capacities of all households. On the other hand, rural poor households' protein demand tends to be enhanced by a general increase in assets, livestock, and crop buffer stocks. These findings illustrate that governments in low‐income countries should focus their policy efforts on ensuring food affordability by avoiding price peaks for those food commodities playing major roles in typical national diets. We also conclude that the ongoing Investment for Food and Jobs policy in Ghana helps improving poor households' resilience capacities by raising their buffer stocks, boosting their assets, or increasing the number of livestock kept.

The understanding of the role of using forest resources in the livelihood strategies of smallholder farmers is limited. Rural household surveys often omit this aspect. From a survey of 600 Indonesian cattle farmers, we apply the sustainable livelihood framework to investigate the role extracting forest resources has in livelihood strategies and household income. We also quantify which farmers’ characteristics impact the decision to extract them. Forest extraction appears a core livelihood strategy of farmers who rely in some way on forests, which are on average poorer. Our findings suggest that forest extraction increases with increased income diversification. Farmers who specialize as feeders in the cattle supply chain engage significantly less in that. The promotion of sustainable forest resource usage schemes, such as agroforestry or silvopastoral systems that facilitate, and support cattle breeding would maintain the supply of youngstock for feeders and contribute to sustainable future use of forest resources.

The Russian Federation’s efforts to expand its regional political influence culminated in launching a full‐scale war of aggression on Ukraine on 24 February 2022. As both countries are large exporters of commodities crucial for global food and energy security, the resulting abrupt supply chains disruptions created substantial uncertainty in commodity markets worldwide. This study quantifies to what extent this major shock induced global commodity prices to move more synchronously by gauging their time‐varying comovement. Using the concordance index, it analyses the development of 15 key global commodity price indices from January 2010 to July 2022. We find that the supply chains disruptions increased synchronisation of grain, energy and fertiliser prices at the global level in direction and magnitude. Moreover, they resulted in contagion across numerous food and non‐food markets, creating a global covariate shock to food and energy security. Notably, the increased synchronisation at broad scale restricts the ability of consumers to mitigate the adverse effects of food and energy price inflation by resorting to inexpensive alternatives. Hence, policymakers must improve the resilience of global food supply chains sustainably such that adverse effects of attaining the Sustainable Development Goals in crises can be minimised.

Smallholder farmers in developing countries often lack resources. They rely mostly on extensive production approaches, such as cattle keeping and resort more to extracting forest resources at no charge. Our objective is to assess the relationship between the diversification of income sources, poverty and livelihood capital for smallholder farm households which combine cattle farming with forest extraction. We collected 600 surveys from Indonesian farmers specialized along the cattle rearing supply chain (464 breeders, 66 feeders and 70 mixed breeder-feeders). We found no correlation between poverty and income diversification. Cattle breeders have been found to rely most on forest resources. Distance to cropland and forest correlated positively, whereas their education level correlated negatively with income diversification. Feeders who were owning other livestock, were a member of a forest user group and owned some modest capital like a motorbike showed increased income diversification. Crops are the most important source of income for farmers, whereas cattle keeping and forest extraction play a role in income diversification. Increasing ecological pressure caused by forest extraction due to expanding cattle production could be best avoided by extending those parts of the cattle sector that use forest resources in a sustainable manner, for instance, through silvopastural systems or agroforestry so that incomes of poor farmers get more diversified and, therefore stabilized.

The Green Moroccan Plan (GMP) is a national long-term strategy launched by the Moroccan government to support the agricultural sector as the main driver of social and economic development. The GMP involves a labeling strategy based on geographical indications, aimed at protecting and promoting the marketing of locally produced food specialties and linking their specific qualities and reputations to their domestic production region. We evaluated the success of this policy by comparing consumers’ attitudes and preferences toward a local product having a geographical indication label to one without. We conducted a survey of 500 consumers in main Moroccan cities. The potential consumer set for the local product was found to be segmented, indicating the potential for a domestic niche of environmentally aware consumers preferring organically and sustainably produced food. We applied the analytical hierarchy process to prioritize the attributes of the commodities of interest, which underscores the importance of the origin when choosing a local product without origin labeling; for the labeled product, intrinsic quality attributes are considered to be more important. These findings demonstrate the limited promotion of the established origin labeling in the domestic market. Hence, we recommend that the Moroccan government reinforce the labeling scheme with an organic label to increase the market potential of the environmentally aware consumers by ensuring sustainable production of local products.

Agglomerations of agricultural activity yield a number of institutional and infrastructural benefits for farmers. However, these regional concentrations also increase competition between farmers. We quantify to what extent competitive pressure affects farmers’ behaviour in agro-clusters analysing a survey of 1,250 farmers in West Java. This assessment is derived from a conceptual model based on the theory of planned behaviour and the behavioural interaction model. We also derive several hypotheses which are econometrically tested. We find that the specific competitive environments farmers are exposed to for specific aspects of agricultural production matter most. In high density agglomeration environments, lower degrees of peer pressure foster cooperative behaviour. Food insecurity is found to enlarge self-interest, more intense cooperation is associated with lower income levels and appears to be regionally heterogeneous. Policies intended to facilitate cooperation could therefore be tailored to specific aspects of agricultural production and the specific region of interest.