Christopher B. Barrett

Cornell University | CU · Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

Tracking environmental change is important to ensure efficient and sustainable natural resources management. Eastern Africa is dominated by arid and semi-arid rangeland systems, where extensive grazing of livestock represents the primary livelihood for most people. Despite several mapping efforts, eastern Africa lacks accurate and reliable high-res...

Innovation Portfolio Management refers to the systems, processes and mechanisms to intentionally manage innovation investments and decisions within an organization against its mission or strategy. This approach to managing and optimizing innovation and scaling investments is rarely used by public non-profit R&D organizations. This study draws lesso...

Agriculture’s global environmental impacts are widely expected to continue expanding, driven by population and economic growth and dietary changes. This Review highlights climate change as an additional amplifier of agriculture’s environmental impacts, by reducing agricultural productivity, reducing the efficacy of agrochemicals, increasing soil er...

This short book outlines the origins and evolution of an international award-winning development intervention, index-based livestock insurance (IBLI), which scaled from a small pilot project in Kenya to a design that underpins drought risk management products and policies across Africa. General insights are provided on (1) the economics of poverty,...

Projected increases in food demand driven by population growth coupled with heightened agricultural vulnerability to climate change jointly pose severe threats to global food security in the coming decades, especially for developing nations. By providing real-time and low-cost observations, satellite remote sensing has been widely employed to estim...

Understanding the effectiveness of conservation interventions during times of political instability is important given how much of the world’s biodiversity is concentrated in politically fragile nations. Here, we investigate the effect of a political crisis on the relative performance of community managed forests versus protected areas in terms of...

In this perspective, we offer insights into the evolution of CGIAR’s research and innovation portfolio from 2019 to 2023, underpinning the transformative journey towards One CGIAR. With this contribution, we aim to strengthen the social and environmental sustainability components of allied, future Research for Development (R4D) portfolios. We explo...

Tracking environmental change is important to ensure efficient and sustainable natural resources management. East Africa is dominated by arid and semi-arid rangeland systems, where extensive grazing of livestock represents the primary livelihood for most of the human population. Despite several mapping efforts, East Africa lacks accurate and reliab...

Food demand is projected to increase significantly over the coming decades. Sustainable intensification (SI) is essential to meet this demand. SI is particularly important in smallholder systems, yet to date it remains unclear what the most promising SI strategies are to increase food production and farmer incomes at scale. We review the literature...

We study household food security dynamics in the United States from 2001 to 2017 using a new measure, the probability of food security (PFS), the estimated probability that a household's food expenditures equal or exceed the minimum cost of a healthful diet. We use PFS to analyze household‐level and subpopulation‐scale dynamics by investigating the...

The long-recognized spurious regressions problem can lead to mistaken inference in panel instrumental variables (IV) estimation. Spurious correlations arising from correlated cycles in finite time horizons can make irrelevant instruments appear strong with signable consequences for estimated IV coefficients, or interfere with valid of inference of...

Although the global food system increasingly is viewed as unsustainable for human and planetary health, the policy pathways for transforming the status quo are often highly contentious. This book brings together inter-disciplinary scholars to analyze the political economy dynamics central to food system transformation and to identify pathways for e...

Many communities in low- and middle-income countries globally lack sustainable, cost-effective and mutually beneficial solutions for infectious disease, food, water and poverty challenges, despite their inherent interdependence1–7. Here we provide support for the hypothesis that agricultural development and fertilizer use in West Africa increase th...

Understanding the effectiveness of conservation interventions during times of political instability is important given how much of the world’s biodiversity is concentrated in politically fragile nations. We investigated the effect of a political crisis on the relative performance of community managed forests versus state-managed protected areas in...

An evolving literature evaluates the inferential and behavioral implications of measurement error (ME) in agricultural data. We synthesize findings on the nature and sources of ME and potential remedies. We provide practical guidance for choosing among alternative approaches for detecting, obviating, or correcting for alternative sources of ME, as...

Food demand is projected to increase significantly over the coming decades. Sustainable intensification (SI) is essential to meet this demand. SI is particularly important in smallholder systems, yet to date it remains unclear what the most promising SI strategies are to increase food production and farmer incomes at scale. We review the literature...

Resilience offers a useful lens for studying how human well-being and agri-food systems absorb and recover from a range of shocks and stressors, including the COVID-19 pandemic. Looking beyond the direct effects of observable shocks to the mechanisms that shape their impacts can guide our understanding of COVID-19 and leverage findings from the pan...

Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) is a remotely sensed optical signal emitted during the light reactions of photosynthesis. The past two decades have witnessed an explosion in availability of SIF data at increasingly higher spatial and temporal resolutions, sparking applications in diverse research sectors (e.g., ecology, agriculture, hy...

Although our observing capabilities of solar‐induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) have been growing rapidly, the quality and consistency of SIF datasets are still in an active stage of research and development. As a result, there are considerable inconsistencies among diverse SIF datasets at all scales and the widespread applications of them have...

Among the millions of food insecure people in high income countries, only a modest fraction uses food pantries. Stigma is commonly cited as a barrier to use and may arise due to the perceived low product quality of pantry offerings. This study tests the hypothesis that “product stigma” is present among prospective pantry clients. In an online exper...

Advances in food security proceed unevenly within and across nations. A striking pattern emerges from analysis of >560,000 individual responses to the first globally comparable, nationally representative, repeated food insecurity survey, which is statistically representative of >96% of the world's population. We find the relationship between the pr...

Agri-food value chains (AVCs) intermediate the flow of products between largely rural farmers, fisherfolk, or herders and increasingly urban consumers. The theoretical models that historically structured research on the economic development process assumed away AVC functions, however, and AVC firms and workers were necessarily omitted from the hous...

A rapidly expanding literature causally links exposure to violence to changes in a variety of behavioral parameters. The estimated coefficients, however, vary greatly across studies in both magnitude and sign. Using original panel data and disaggregated measures of exposure to plausibly exogenous violence in northern Uganda, we investigate the effe...

For decades, the lack of high‐quality empirical economic research on the state of Africa's agriculture and rural economies has been an important factor impeding the formulation of evidence‐based policy on the continent. The Structural Transformation of African Agriculture and Rural Spaces program aims to build a critical mass of early career Africa...

Because AFSs are diverse, dynamic, and evolve continuously, they require massive continuous investment to enable ongoing discovery and adaptation merely to prevent backsliding.

As development and humanitarian agencies increasingly advance the objective of ‘building resilience’, three resilience measurement methods have come into especially widespread use: the Resilience Indicators for Measurement and Analysis approach developed by FAO, the multi-dimensional index approach developed by TANGO International, and the probabil...

So how do we reverse the growing carbon, land, and toxic chemical footprint of contemporary AVCs; expand the nutrient-rich food supply; and induce more equitable, inclusive, healthier food environments—and thus consumption patterns—so as to navigate from today’s unsustainable and precarious AVCs to a warmer, more urban, more African, and shock-pron...

As we look 25–50 years, or more, into the future, we must also keep in mind how very different tomorrow’s world will inevitably look. Three big, inevitable changes stand out, with serious implications for AFS and AVC innovations.

The complex pathways from innovation to impact mean that unintended spilloverSpillovers effects on non-target objectives are always likely. This generates a third reason—in addition to accelerators and complementarity in pursuit of target objectives—why socio-technical bundlesBundle/bundling are important. Herrero et al. (2020, 2021) demonstrated t...

Scientific discovery is neither linear nor predictable. The time it takes to develop breakthrough technologies varies enormously among application domains. Some basic scientific discoveries remain elusive and will need continued, concerted funding and attention in the years and decades ahead. In some cases, the stumbling block is the scientific adv...

Technological and institutional innovationsin agri-food systems (AFSs) over the past century have brought dramatic advances in human well-being worldwide.

A key implication of the abundance of promising technologies in various stages of development is that AFS transformation is less likely to be limited by science-based discovery than by human agency . What key players do in response to the wealth of options they face will ultimately determine the path(s) we follow.

Repeated episodes throughout history remind us that AFSs episodically undergo dramatic transformations, most of them purposeful—guided by incentives prevailing at the time—rather than purely random changes. Typically, these changes have taken decades or centuries. A major shock, like the COVID-19 pandemic, may help spark the more rapid transformati...

One might reasonably invoke Dickens in describing AFSs and AVCs today: “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

As detailed in Marshall et al. (Quinn Marshall, Jessica Fanzo, Christopher B. Barrett, Andrew D. Jones, Anna Herforth, and Rebecca McLaren, “Building a global food systems typology: A new tool for reducing complexity in food systems analysis,” Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, vol. 5 (November 2021): 746512), the food systemsFoodsystemstypolog...

Food systems have a profound impact on diets, nutrition, health, economic development, and environmental sustainability. Yet their complexity poses a persistent challenge in identifying the policy actions that are needed to improve human and planetary health outcomes. Typologies are a useful classification tool to identify similarities and differen...

Agrifood supply chains contribute to many environmental and social problems. Sustainability standards—rules that supply chain actors may follow to demonstrate their commitment to social equity and/or environmental protection—aim to mitigate such problems. We provide a narrative review of the effects of many distinct sustainability standards on diff...

Charcoal is the main cooking fuel in urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa and demand is expected to rise with urbanization. We explore the environmental footprint and socioeconomic drivers of charcoal production, using data from original field vegetation and producer surveys in a hotspot charcoal production area outside Lusaka, Zambia. We find that la...

Development and humanitarian agencies have rapidly embraced the concept of resilience since the 2008 global financial and food price crises. We report the results of a formal scoping review of the literature on development resilience over the ensuing period. The review identifies the theoretical and methodological underpinnings and empirical applic...

We use the full administrative records from four leading agricultural economics journals to study the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on manuscript submission, editorial desk rejection and reviewer acceptance rates, and time to editorial decision. We also test for gender differences in these impacts. Manuscript submissions increased sharply and eq...

Advances in remote sensing and machine learning enable increasingly accurate, inexpensive, and timely estimation of poverty and malnutrition indicators to guide development and humanitarian agencies’ programming. However, state of the art models often rely on proprietary data and/or deep or transfer learning methods whose underlying mechanics may b...

Generating credible answers to key policy questions is crucial but difficult in most coupled human and natural systems because complex feedback mechanisms can confound identification of the causal mechanisms behind observed phenomena. By using explicit research designs intended to isolate the causal effects of specific interventions on community mo...

We report the results of a large‐scale, multi‐year experimental evaluation of the System of Rice Intensification (SRI), an innovation that first emerged in Madagascar in the 1980s and has now diffused to more than fifty countries. Using a randomized training saturation design with a pure control group, we find that greater cross‐sectional or intert...

Increasingly plentiful data and powerful predictive algorithms heighten the promise of data science for humanitarian and development programming. We advocate for embrace of, and investment in, machine learning methods for poverty and malnutrition targeting, mapping, monitoring, and early warning while also cautioning that distinct objectives requir...

Progress towards many United Nations Sustainable Development Goals depends on interventions in food value chains, yet data and methods have thus far limited the production of cross-nationally comparable estimates of food value chains’ magnitudes. Here we develop a standardized method and data series to estimate the distribution of consumer food exp...

Climate change will reshape ecological dynamics. Yet, how temperature increases alter the behavior and resource use of people reliant on natural resources remains underexplored. Consequent behavior shifts have the potential to mitigate or accelerate climate impacts on livelihoods and food security. Particularly within the small-scale inland fisheri...

Foresight and trade-off analyses offer organizations such as CGIAR an opportunity to better prepare for alternative futures through adaptive research strategy and management. This essay introduces a set of papers that explore foresight and trade-off analyses within the context of the major reforms now occurring in the CGIAR. We tease out lessons no...

The mechanism(s) that generate measurement error matter for inference. Survey measurement error is typically thought to represent simple misreporting correctable through improved measurement. But errors might also or alternatively reflect respondent misperceptions that materially affect the respondent decisions under study. We show analytically tha...

Coupling technological advances with sociocultural and policy changes can transform agri-food systems to address pressing climate, economic, environmental, health and social challenges. An international expert panel reports on options to induce contextualized combinations of innovations that can balance multiple goals.

Food system innovations will be instrumental to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, major innovation breakthroughs can trigger profound and disruptive changes, leading to simultaneous and interlinked reconfigurations of multiple parts of the global food system. The emergence of new technologies or social solutions, the...

Link to public copy https://www.nature.com/documents/Bundles_agrifood_transformation.pdf

Most existing program evaluation methods examine the average impact of a program. This necessarily overlooks the potential for different program impacts over different parts of the distribution of the variable of interest. To overcome this limitation, we develop a novel methodology for program evaluation which combines stochastic dominance with dif...

The world faces formidable, but manageable, challenges in achieving food security in a world growing beyond 9 billion people in the coming decades. Five big challenges will necessitate shifting innovation strategy to place greater emphasis on sustainable increases in diet quality, on total factor productivity ‐ not just crop yield ‐ growth, on soci...

Increasing food production to meet growing demand while reducing tropical deforestation is a critical sustainability challenge. This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, which faces serious food insecurity issues and where smallholder farming is the main driver of forest conversion. Competing theories imply opposite predictions as to whether d...

We present evidence that farmers adjust agricultural inputs in response to within-season temperature variation, undertaking defensive investments to reduce the adverse agroecological impacts of warmer temperatures. Using panel data from Kenyan maize growing households, we find that higher temperatures early in the growing season increase the use of...

COVID-19 is disrupting food systems globally and governments must stabilize food supply chains and thoughtfully expand social safety nets now to avert social unrest. Lessons learned from the 2008–2012 food price crises point to seven actionable points to consider.

We combine nationally representative household and labor force survey data from 1992 to 2016 to provide a detailed description of rural labor market evolution and how it relates to the structural transformation of rural Vietnam, especially within the agricultural sector. Our study adds to the emerging literature on structural transformation in low-...