INFORMATION ON AGRICULTURAL POLICIES ESSENTIAL FOR FOOD SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

Policy makers in virtually all countries intervene in agricultural markets to influence the cost of food to their consumers and the prices their farmers receive for their products. Many of these interventions are not transparent in their effects and their collective impacts can have dramatic impacts on world food prices.

Unfortunately, providing comprehensive measures of the effects of these interventions is beyond the ability of any one institution. The OECD measures the impacts of these incentives in its members and in a group of major developing countries. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) measures the impacts of policies in many lower income countries—primarily in Africa--where agriculture is a larger share of the economy; and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) measures policy impacts in Latin America and the Caribbean.

These organizations, together with the World Bank (WB) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), have been working since 2017 to make available the most comprehensive database on agricultural incentives at a single location using comparable measures. The AgIncentives website maintained by the group brings together data; provides tools to visualize their level and changes over time and allows members to access data on agricultural incentives covering the vast majority of world agriculture.