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IFPRI in Bangladesh -- USAID Lauds IFPRI's Work in Bangladesh
The work of IFPRI’s research team in Bangladesh, which is studying ways to improve food security in that country, received rave reviews in a recently released interim performance report by the U. S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in Dhaka. This is the second year in a row that the project has received an “excellent” rating from USAID.
IFPRI, the report states, has “demonstrated exceptional performance and has far exceeded acceptable quality levels. . . . Although some of the advisory services were urgently demanded by the Government of Bangladesh, IFPRI did not sacrifice quality of service.” The report, which evaluates project performance from April 1998 to April 1999, the second year of the project, also commends IFPRI for helping the Ministry of Food manage its overall food stocks and distribution in the face of an extremely adverse situation: the flood of the century in 1998. It commends several studies that the government found particularly useful in choosing appropriate policy interventions and lauds IFPRI’s training program as being “of the highest standard.” Moreover, “reports and advisory services were delivered far ahead of the deadline.”
Bangladesh has been liberalizing its agricultural markets and attempting to create more efficient, targeted means of delivering food aid to the poor since the late 1970s, after IFPRI conducted a food policy review of the new nation. Bangladesh is now well on its way to meeting these goals and to instituting effective disaster preparedness, stimulating domestic agricultural production, and strengthening local food policy analysis. IFPRI’s current work aims to bolster these objectives by providing food policy advisory services to the Ministry of Food, leading policy analysis training programs for government and private foodgrain-sector personnel, conducting policy-oriented research, and disseminating research results. The four-year project, which began in 1997, is being carried out in collaboration with the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies, the University of Minnesota, and the International Science and Technology Institute.
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