Strengthening smallholder agriculture is essential to defend food and nutrition security and rural livelihoods in Myanmar against the COVID-19 threat: Elements for a proactive response - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Strengthening smallholder agriculture is essential to defend food and nutrition security and rural livelihoods in Myanmar against the COVID-19 threat: Elements for a proactive response write by Boughton, Duncan. This book was released on 2020-04-16. Strengthening smallholder agriculture is essential to defend food and nutrition security and rural livelihoods in Myanmar against the COVID-19 threat: Elements for a proactive response available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. There is an urgent need to anticipate and mitigate the threat posed by COVID-19 to Myanmar’s agricultural sector and to rural households that depend on farming for income and for food and nutrition security. We evaluate options to address the threat and to support farmers to prepare their land and plant their crops on time in the short window before the start of the 2020 monsoon cropping season. Recognizing that no single intervention can address the full range of vulnerabilities faced by rural households, we recommend a combination: • Expansion of access to seasonal farm credit with extended loan repayment schedules; • Limited agricultural input subsidies targeting certified seed; and • Implementation of a cash transfer program to smallholder farmers. Despite the high cost of a cash transfer program, there are good reasons to expect that the benefits of such support to farm households will outweigh program costs in monetary terms – even more so if the economic benefits from the consequent lower incidence of malnutrition to which the program would contribute can be measured.
Beyond emergency relief: What will it take to ensure a resilient recovery for agriculture and the rural economy of Myanmar
Beyond emergency relief: What will it take to ensure a resilient recovery for agriculture and the rural economy of Myanmar - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Beyond emergency relief: What will it take to ensure a resilient recovery for agriculture and the rural economy of Myanmar write by Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA). This book was released on 2022-02-02. Beyond emergency relief: What will it take to ensure a resilient recovery for agriculture and the rural economy of Myanmar available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The recent history of rural economic transformation in Myanmar and the effects of COVID-19 and the military coup in February 2021 provide important lessons for the design and implementation of plans to help the country recover from these scourges. The impoverishment of farming communities in Myanmar during decades of socialist military rule, beginning in the 1960s until the turn of the century, led to an outflux of migrants to neighboring countries. As the country opened up to foreign investment through economic reforms initiated in 2011, rural wages surged and farm mechanization services expanded rapidly. Together with increased remittance flows from migrants, higher rural household incomes drove growth in a wide range of non-farm service enterprises. Nevertheless, agricultural growth was low and most crop subsectors stagnated due to underlying and unresolved structural constraints such as poor infrastructure and inequality in land access. As in many other countries in Asia, border closures and lockdowns instituted to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020 resulted in widespread employment and income losses. The Myanmar government pro-actively sought to mitigate the impacts through expanded credit to farmers and businesses. By the end of 2020, Myanmar was beginning to recover from the economic stresses of COVID-19. However, the February 2021 military coup resulted in a far more severe economic downturn than COVID-19 due to the collapse of the financial system, the massive resignations by public sector employees, and the prolonged movement restrictions. Coup-induced state failure greatly magnified the health and economic consequences of COVID-19 in terms of poverty, food insecurity, and stalled economic transformation. This paper uses a combination of macro, meso, and micro-level analyses to measure the impacts of COVID-19 and state failure on rural economic transformation through the lens of the agri-food system, and to draw lessons for policies to support broad-based and resilient economic recovery.
Poverty, food insecurity, and social protection during COVID-19 in Myanmar: Combined evidence from a household telephone survey and micro-simulations
Poverty, food insecurity, and social protection during COVID-19 in Myanmar: Combined evidence from a household telephone survey and micro-simulations - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Poverty, food insecurity, and social protection during COVID-19 in Myanmar: Combined evidence from a household telephone survey and micro-simulations write by Headey, Derek D.. This book was released on 2020-11-10. Poverty, food insecurity, and social protection during COVID-19 in Myanmar: Combined evidence from a household telephone survey and micro-simulations available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This study assesses the welfare impacts of COVID-19 on households in Myanmar by combining recent high-frequency telephone survey evidence for two specific rural and urban geographies with national-level survey-based simulations designed to assess ex-ante impacts on poverty with differing amounts of targeted cash transfers. The first source of evidence – the COVID-19 Rural and Urban Food Security Survey (C19- RUFSS) – consists of four rounds of monthly data collected from a sample of over 2,000 households, all with young children or pregnant mothers, divided evenly between urban and peri-urban Yangon and the rural Dry Zone. This survey sheds light on household incomes prior to COVID-19 (January 2020), incomes and food security status soon after the first COVID-19 wave (June 2020), the gradual economic recovery thereafter (July and August 2020), and the start of the second COVID-19 wave in September and October 2020. This survey gives timely and high-quality evidence on the recent welfare impacts of COVID-19 for two important geographies and for households that are nutritionally highly vulnerable to shocks due to the presence of very young children or pregnant mothers. However, the relatively narrow geographic and demographic focus of this telephone survey and the need for forecasting the poverty impacts of COVID-19 into 2021 prompt us to explore simulationbased evidence derived by applying parameter shocks to household models developed from nationally representative household survey data collected prior to COVID-19, the 2015 Myanmar Poverty and Living Conditions Survey (MPLCS). By realistically simulating the kinds of disruptions imposed on Myanmar’s economy by both international forces, e.g., lower agricultural exports and workers’ remittances, and domestic COVID-19 prevention measures. e.g., stay-at-home orders and temporary business closures, we not only can predict the impacts of COVID-19 on household poverty at the rural, urban, and national levels, but also can assess the further benefits to household welfare of social protection in the form of monthly household cash transfers of different magnitudes. Combined, these two sources of evidence yield insights on both the on-the-ground impacts of COVID-19 in recent months and the potential poverty reduction impacts of social protection measures in the coming year. We conclude the study with a discussion of the policy implications of these findings.
Livelihood resilience and the agrifood system in Myanmar: Implications for agriculture and a rural development strategy in a time of crisis
Livelihood resilience and the agrifood system in Myanmar: Implications for agriculture and a rural development strategy in a time of crisis - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Livelihood resilience and the agrifood system in Myanmar: Implications for agriculture and a rural development strategy in a time of crisis write by Myanmar Agriculture Policy Support Activity (MAPSA). This book was released on 2023-08-24. Livelihood resilience and the agrifood system in Myanmar: Implications for agriculture and a rural development strategy in a time of crisis available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Myanmar’s agrifood system has proven surprisingly resilient in the face of multiple crises—COVID 19, the military coup, economic mismanagement, global price instability, and widespread conflict—with respect to production and exports. Household welfare has not been resilient, however. High rates of inflation, especially food price inflation, have resulted in dietary degradation across all house hold groups, especially those dependent on casual wage labor. Among household members, young children experience the highest rates of inadequate dietary quality. Expanded social protection to improve access to better-quality diets for vulnerable households and individuals is therefore needed. Beyond the current political crisis, increased public and private investment in a more efficient and dynamic agrifood system should be a high priority. This will help drive down poverty rates and ensure access to healthy diets in the near term, while laying the foundation for sustained growth and structural transformation of the economy.
COVID-19 impacts on smallholder farmers in Northern Shan State in Myanmar
COVID-19 impacts on smallholder farmers in Northern Shan State in Myanmar - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook COVID-19 impacts on smallholder farmers in Northern Shan State in Myanmar write by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. This book was released on 2021-12-22. COVID-19 impacts on smallholder farmers in Northern Shan State in Myanmar available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Report on how the first wave of COVID-19 impacted on smallholder farmers in northern Shan State in Myanmar. The study examines the interactions of reduced border trade, remittances and contracted labour markets on household food security, nutrition and land tenure. In turn, tenure insecurity in rural areas may deepen the effects of COVID-19, as most rural people struggle to sustain their livelihoods through access to land and other natural resources. This is relevant as many ethnic groups in northern Shan State continue to manage their land through customary tenure systems that are not fully recognized by state authorities.
