IFPRI launched Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development on November 12 with a policy seminar and press briefing. The book pulls together major successes in agricultural development that have brought millions of people out of hunger over the past 50 years.

• More about the project
• Case study discussion papers
• Press kit

Fatoumata, a young girl in Mali, does more than just act like a kid. She helps her mother run the household by pounding millet for the family’s meals, cares for the family’s chickens and goats, sells goods at the market, and works in her family’s fields, in addition to attending school. Fatoumata represents the critical role children play in preserving family livelihoods in agriculture, in Mali as well as in other developing countries. Widespread variation in how child labor is measured both within and across countries may give false policy signals concerning children’s welfare.

Climate change and agriculture are vitally linked, as each has profound implications for the other. This year’s Blog Action Day, with its focus on climate change, is the perfect opportunity to remind everyone in the development and environmental fields about this relationship, to help ensure that poor people are not adversely affected by climate change.

Maintaining momentum to ensure that specific agricultural adaptation and mitigation measures remain on the agenda at the UNFCCC meetings in Copenhagen in December is the focus of an article by IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Gerald Nelson in the September issue of the CGIAR newsletter. The newsletter features several other stories on the relationships between agriculture and climate change. http://www.cgiar.org/enews/september2009/story_02.html