CGD Policy Blogs

The G20 leaders at the summit in Los Cabos, Mexico are no doubt focused on the global economic slowdown and ongoing Eurozone crisis, but an ad hoc group of donors took time on Monday to announce the launch of a concrete development deliverable.  The governments of Australia, Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, and United States, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will provide up to $100 million in results-based financing, using pull mechanism

This is a joint post with Owen Barder

Whether future historians remember last week’s G-20 Summit in Cannes will depend on what happens in the weeks and months ahead. If the eurozone problems spiral out of control, Cannes will be to the coming crash as the 1933 London Economic Conference was to the Great Depression: a lost chance to avert calamity. If Europe muddles through, the brief association of Cannes with the G-20 will be soon forgotten and the resort will again be famous for its film festival.

Last week finance ministers and central bankers from around the globe convened in Washington for the annual meetings of the international Monetary Fund and World Bank. While the press and many of the meeting participants focused on the unfolding European financial crisis, below the radar there was plenty of discussion on development issues, including on the legacy of the Seoul Development Consensus and the role of development in the upcoming G-20 Summit in France.

This is a joint post with Connie Veillette

The G20 agriculture ministers seem to agree: they're all for food security, as long as it doesn't cost anything. The communiqué from last week's summit in Paris has lots of nice rhetoric and some good ideas, but no resources to implement them. In some cases, new priorities duplicate other efforts; in others, the ministers overlooked policy options that would have a big impact and cost little – or even save money – as with increased trade access or ending export restrictions and biofuel subsidies.

For example, take the proposed new Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) “to improve the quality, reliability, accuracy, timeliness and comparability of data on agricultural markets (production, consumption and stocks);” who could disagree with that? But the UN Food and Agricultural Organization already collates and publishes much of the available data (as well as regularly reporting on the outlook for food and individual commodity markets), and USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) reports on a wide range of conditions that could lead to famine. So is the need really for a new system to do pretty much the same thing or is the need for resources to help developing countries build the capacity to improve local data collection that can then be fed into the FAO system?