
Joachim von BraunUniversity of Bonn | Uni Bonn · Center for Development Research
Joachim von Braun
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Introduction
Development Economics,
Agriculture and Nutrition
Publications
Publications (402)
This report aims to inform policy and investment decisions to address food insecurity which are urgently needed to achieve significant reductions in hunger (undernourishment) and malnutrition. To this end, it summarizes key findings from 10 years of research conducted in the Program of Accompanying Research for Agricultural Innovation (PARI) and pr...
Background Compound and cascading shocks are common in rural areas and pose significant threats to food security and household welfare. While the importance of these combined shocks for rural communities is gaining attention, there is still very limited empirical research on the topic. This paper aims to assess the combined effects of weather and h...
This paper estimates the effect of short‐term changes in real consumer food prices on short‐term fluctuations in neonatal, infant, and child mortality rates using a panel dataset covering 59 low‐ and middle‐income countries (LMICs) for the period 2000–2015. Quarterly mortality rates were constructed from over 145 rounds of the standard Demographic...
Scholars have proposed agroecology as a promising method for promoting sustainable and socially just agricultural production systems. However, the extent to which agroecological practices will generate the yields required to ensure sufficient food globally remains unclear. This notion is particularly true in the context of Africa, where agricultura...
This paper analyzes the current uptake of small-scale irrigation (SSI1), its profitability, and the constraints to its broader adoption in the Sahel using literature and survey data from Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and Senegal. Unlike most of the literature on irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), this analysis distinguishes unambiguously between...
Background
The increased prevalence of overweight and obesity, along with high diet diversity, is observed among higher socio-economic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. One contributing factor to these observed variations is food choice motives. However, the role of these motives in explaining the observed differences has not been thoroughly explored i...
Analyses of inequalities related to prevention and cancer therapeutics/care show disparities between countries with different economic standing, and within countries with high Gross Domestic Product. The development of basic, technological and biological research provides clinical and prevention opportunities that make their implementation into hea...
Food systems have significant externalities that are not reflected in market prices. A first step to correct parts of these externalities is to make them transparent through “true‐” or full‐cost accounting. Estimates of the external health and environmental costs of food systems at a global level suggest that they may be about two times larger than...
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights the importance of reaching net-zero CO2 emissions globally by 2050. Unlocking the potential of natural climate solutions in the strive for net-zero emissions is increasingly gaining attention. A large potential may arise from the adoption of agricultural practices that increase carbon...
This Open Access book compiles the findings of the Scientific Group of the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021 and its research partners. The Scientific Group was an independent group of 28 food systems scientists from all over the world with a mandate from the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations.
The chapters provide science- and...
This study developed a marginal abatement cost curve (MACC) to identify a mix of least-cost investment options with the highest potential for hunger reduction, hunger here defined by the undernourishment concept of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Twenty-two different interventions are considered for reducing undernourishment relying on...
The simultaneous coexistence of food loss and waste and prevalence of hunger, undernourishment and malnutrition represents a failure of contemporary food systems. While the reduction in food loss and waste is a Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target, this reduction can also help in the achievement of other SDGs, including achieving zero hunger a...
Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing their environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. One of the central problems of current food systems is that many of the costs of harmful foods are externalized, i.e., are not reflected in market prices. At the same time, the benefits of heal...
Food Systems at the global level and in many countries and regions are failing to end hunger, assure the safety of foods, provide adequate nutritious foods and contribute to obesity. How we produce and consume food has implications for the health of people, animals, plants and the planet itself. In this chapter, we focus on priority actions and the...
Science offers many important contributions to achieving the SDGs, of which we highlight two here: first, science generates the basic inputs for innovations, i.e., policy and institutional innovations (including social and business innovations), as well as technology-based innovations to catalyze, support, and accelerate food system transformation;...
In the “Chair Summary and Statement of Action on the UN Food Systems Summit,” the UN Secretary-General emphasized the role of science for the transformation of the food systems. A “Food Systems Follow-up Coordination Hub” and “Country Level Platforms led by the (national) Government(s)” will lead the follow-up on the UNFSS Action Agenda. A communit...
The United Nations with its Food Systems Summit 2021 and member countries seek to alter food systems to be healthier, safer, more sustainable, efficient and equitable. This chapter informs about concepts and definitions of food systems and the determinants of their change. To foster a clear understanding of food systems, especially regarding the UN...
ZEF Policy Brief # 44, Center for Development Research, University of Bonn
African Union member states decided to establish "the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) during the 18 th meeting of 2012 at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The AfCFTA aims at facilitating intra-African trade and improving Africa's trading position in the global market. In this study, we critically review and discuss the empirical studies on the t...
Bioeconomy advanced rapidly worldwide as a concept and as an important element of transformative economic strategies. This mini-review asks, what were the exogenous and the endogenous drivers? Bioeconomy is exogenously driven by recent advances in basic science facilitating bio-product innovations, and by the increasingly recognized need to address...
More than forty states worldwide currently pursue explicit political strategies to expand and promote their bioeconomies. This chapter assesses these strategies in the context of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and differentiates between four pathways of bioeconomic developments. The extent to which bioeconomic developments along th...
The water-energy-food (WEF) nexus provides a valuable framework for guiding multi-stakeholder interactions for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs) in the food systems through: firstly, helping identify and boost the positive synergies from their heterogeneous actions with the aim to eradicate hunger and malnutrition; secondly, by helping...
As part of the dissemination of sustainable intensification (SI) of agricultural practices in northern Ghana, farmers were conditionally induced with inputs to adopt the SI practices. We study the effects of the conditional inducement on maize yield and net income of farmers under a quasi-randomised phase-out design. We examine the effects of the i...
Achievement of Sustainable Development Goals critically depends on well-functioning food systems which can provide sufficient and healthy food for all in an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially equitable manner. However, current food systems are failing on all of these dimensions. In fact, food systems are generating substa...
Malaria elimination will be challenging in countries that currently continue to bear high malaria burden. Sex-ratio distorting gene drives, such as driving-Y, could play a role in an integrated elimination strategy if they can effectively suppress vector populations. Using a spatially explicit, agent-based model of malaria transmission in eight pro...
The effects of agricultural technology adoption on farm performance have been studied extensively but with limited information on who should be targeted during scaling-up. We adopt the newly defined marginal treatment effect approach in examining how farmers' resource endowment and unobserved factors influence the marginal benefits of adopting sust...
We examine the consequences of conflict exposure on food consumption and consumption pathways three and six years after the cessation of hostilities of the Lord Resistance Army insurgency in Northern Uganda. We use the correlated random effects model and fractional multinomial response model with nationally representative panel data collected durin...
For fruitful deliberations and concerted action at the science–politics interface, the concepts of food systems and drivers of change need to be clearly understood and employed by all.
The Earth’s climatic, ecological, and human systems are converging towards an existential crisis for global civilization within the lifetimes of children now living. Precursors of that crisis are already evident and likely to be further amplified as human population peaks around the end of the twenty-first century. A year ago, the statement from th...
In 2020, India and Africa constituted around 35 percent of the world population and three-quarters of the world’s poor (World Bank, 2020). In 1980 population growth in India was 2.3 percent but came down to 1 percent in 2020, whereas in Africa it was 2.8 percent and only reduced to 2.5 percent. Africa’s population is expected to surpass India’s in...
This book identifies ways in which Africa can realize its potential to secure a supply of food for affordable and healthy diets through the sustainable use of its own resources. The focus is on investment, cooperation, and policy action. The agenda proposed here is intended to be a long-term one, but one that should be initiated in the short term w...
This study developed a marginal abatement cost curve to identify a mix of least-cost investment options with the highest potential for hunger reduction, hunger here defined by the undernourishment concept of the Food and Agriculture Organization. Twenty-two different interventions are considered for reducing undernourishment relying on information...
Here’s how the United Nations should harness science and technology to improve nutrition and safeguard the environment. Here’s how the United Nations should harness science and technology to improve nutrition and safeguard the environment.
The effect of voluntary health insurance on preventive health has received limited research attention in developing countries, even when they suffer immensely from easily preventable illnesses. This paper surveys households in rural south-western Uganda, which are geographically serviced by a voluntary Community-based health insurance scheme, and a...
Ensuring sustainable food systems requires vastly reducing its environmental and health costs while making healthy and sustainable food affordable to all. One of the central problems of current food systems is that many of the costs of harmful foods are externalized, i.e. are not reflected in market prices. At the same time, the benefits of healthf...
Assessments of land degradation vary in methodology and outcome. The objective of this study is to identify the state, extent and patterns of land degradation in Eastern Africa (Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi and Tanzania). More recently (2000s), satellite-based imagery and remote sensing have been utilized to identify the magnitude and processes of land...
This introduction to the volume gives an overview of foundational issues in AI and robotics, looking into AI’s computational basis, brain–AI comparisons, and conflicting positions on AI and consciousness. AI and robotics are changing the future of society in areas such as work, education, industry, farming, and mobility, as well as services like ba...
Artificial intelligence and robotics (AI/R) have the potential to greatly change livelihoods. Information on how AI/R may affect the poor is scarce. This chapter aims to address this gap in research. A framework is established that depicts poverty and marginality conditions of health, education, public services, work, small businesses, including fa...
This open access book examines recent advances in how artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics have elicited widespread debate over their benefits and drawbacks for humanity. The emergent technologies have for instance implications within medicine and health care, employment, transport, manufacturing, agriculture, and armed conflict. While there h...
Das Ziel dieser Studie ist es, zu ermitteln, wie Afrika seine Potenziale ausschöpfen und seine Versorgung mit Lebensmitteln für eine erschwingliche und gesunde Ernährung durch die nachhaltige Nutzung seiner eigenen Ressourcen sichern kann. Afrikas Lebensmittelimporte belaufen sich auf etwa 60 Milliarden US-Dollar pro Jahr (UNCTAD, 2020). In Nettoza...
The aim of this study is to identify how Africa may transform its potentials into realities and actually secure its supply of food for affordable and healthy diets from the sustainable use of resources. Africa’s food imports amount to about US$ 60 billion per
year. In net terms, cereals account for about US$ 25 billion per year, meat and dairy for...
Die Bioökonomie gilt heute weltweit als Schlüsselstrategie für eine nachhaltige gesellschaftliche Entwicklung. Gleichzeitig ist die biobasierte Transformation von technischen, ökonomischen und gesellschaftlichen Voraussetzungen abhängig, die die Bioökonomie selbst nicht erschaffen kann. Mitentscheidend für die Entstehung einer nachhaltigen biobasie...
The tremendous burden of malaria has led to renewed efforts on malaria elimination and the development of novel tools for application where existing tools fall short. Gene drive mosquitoes, where transgenes and their associated phenotypes are efficiently propagated to future generations, are under development to suppress vector populations or rende...
The stability of global, national, and local food systems is at risk under climate change. Climate change affects food production, availability of and access to food, food quality, food safety, diet quality, and thus people’s nutrition and health. Climate change may further slow progress towards a world with food security for all. Climate change im...
Market dynamics on their own will not generate the employment Africa needs. Well-designed public works programmes (PWPs) are needed to create jobs, improve infrastructure and empower poor people, including women and youth.
https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/labour-intensive-public-employment-schemes-build-vital-infrastructure-and-alleviate-poverty
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has illuminated inequities that have put poor people—in both low-income nations and in rich countries—at the greatest risk of suffering. Pope Francis recently pointed to that in an interview: “This is the moment to see the poor.”
„Das Recht auf Leben“ ist in zahlreichen Ländern verfassungsrechtlich garantiert. Obwohl Nahrung zweifelsohne eine notwendige Bedingung für menschliches Leben darstellt, ist es anders als das Recht auf Leben zwar völkerrechtlich garantiert, nicht aber in der deutschen Verfassung verankert. Daraus ergeben sich im Hinblick auf Nahrung und Ernährung u...
While community-based health insurance increasingly becomes part of the health financing landscape in developing countries, there is still limited research about its impacts on health outcomes. Using cross-sectional data from rural south-western Uganda, we apply a two-stage residual inclusion instrumental variables method to study the impact of ins...
Climate change is projected to have a profound effect on natural ecosystems, biodiversity,
and societies both in the Baltic region and globally, particularly so through agriculture and
food systems. The Baltic region has a vast potential for the development of bioeconomy due
to the existing opportunities for biomass production and advances in micro...
In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly recognized access to safe water and sanitation infrastructure a matter of human right. This right is reflected in Sustainable Development Goal 6, whose targets 1 and 2 point to universal access to safe and affordable drinking water and adequate sanitation by 2030, in a gender equitable way. Progress towa...
Background:
The desire for universal health coverage in developing countries has brought attention to communitybased health insurance (CBHI) schemes in developing countries. The government of Uganda is currently debating policy for the national health insurance programme, targeting the integration of existing CBHI schemes into a larger national ri...
Public works programs (PWPs) in sub-Saharan African countries have re-emerged as an important policy to stimulate employment generation in addition to their protective role such as consumption smoothening. The paper reviews evidence on the extent to which empirical research can substantiate the claim that labor-intensive PWPs in African countries h...