Dearth of agri-food research on climate-hit countries

[NAIROBI] Countries hardest hit by hunger and climate change are also the ones with the lowest volume of agri-food research targeting them, according to analysis scoping more than 6 million scientific papers and reports.

Food systems transformation is needed urgently in the face of rising food insecurity – with one in four on the planet facing hunger – and extreme weather events caused by climate change.

However, critical evidence on environmental and climate change outcomes in the regions most impacted by climate change is lacking, as is research around women’s empowerment and inclusivity, says Jaron Porciello, co-founder of The Juno Evidence Alliance, a global evidence synthesis platform to support policymaking on agriculture, food systems, and climate adaptation.

“There is a lot of research out there…and yet at the same time we still seem to have a lack of research focusing on countries with high levels of food insecurity.”

Jaron Porciello, co-founder of The Juno Evidence Alliance

“There is a lot of research out there, more than 1 million papers are published every year in the sciences,” Porciello told SciDev.Net.

“Yet at the same time we still seem to have a lack of research focusing on countries with high levels of food insecurity.”

Juno, a collaboration between the agricultural research organisation CABI (the parent organisation of SciDev.Net), Havos.Ai, a New York-based data company, and the University of Notre Dame, USA, used artificial intelligence (AI) to review the distribution of global research over the last 13 years.

It found that, despite 60 per cent growth in research publications across agrifood systems during that time, levels of scientific research targeting the poorest, most climate-vulnerable countries are “extremely low”.

Some countries, including many smaller island nations, are supported by an evidence base of fewer than 1,000 publications spread across more than 35,000 journals, according to the report, titled The State of the Field for Research on Agrifood Systems.

The Philippines, often ranked as one of the countries most affected by extreme climate events, was the focus of 12,443 publications between 2010 and 2023, as compared to Canada, which was the focus of 185,319 for the same period.

The analysis also found that research involving stakeholders in the agriculture value chain—such as small and medium enterprises and small-scale farmers—accounts for only eight per cent of global agrifood systems research.

Evidence gap

Scientific research carried out by universities, national research centres, and CGIAR institutions play a pivotal role in shaping global development and food security agendas, according to Porciello, lead author of the report.

“Yet there is significant challenge in tracking outcomes including food security across scientific papers,” she said.

“Scientific research is still measured, communicated, and disseminated in a very piecemeal fashion, paper by paper, without putting it in context of what it means in lieu of all of the other research and knowledge that’s out there,” she added.

In an attempt to bridge this gap, researchers from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture calculated the total volume of scientific research papers by thousands, according to the geographic focus of each research article, before analysing the number of research publications per one million people classified as moderate-to-severely hungry.

They found that countries including Nigeria, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and the Philippines had fewer than 3,000 publications per one million hungry people from the past 13 years.

Many of these countries are also among the countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, according to the University of Notre Dame’s GAIN index.

‘Enduring bias’

Changing these patterns requires challenging long-standing norms around dynamics across science and policy, authors of the Juno report say. They call out the “enduring bias” underpinning scientific publishing and funding systems.

Among their recommendations is a call for more investment to support original research in low-income countries – research that considers the ecological, social, and economic dimensions of food systems.

Funders should prioritise investments in women-led research projects and publications, especially from the global South, they urge.

John Kinyuru, a food and nutrition scientist at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, who did not participate in the research, believes the findings are a true reflection of the situation in most low- and middle-income countries.

“Very little funds are dedicated to funding research in developing countries and therefore scientists from these regions only act as collaborators [or] partners in the research and so they won’t appear as primary authors in the manuscripts,” he told SciDev.Net

“Also, since funding is from the developed countries, the research questions are skewed towards answering to the needs of the funder.”

Addressing these issues demands concerted efforts with funders and scientific publishers to “unmute and empower more researchers”, the Juno report concludes.

This piece was produced by SciDev.Net’s Global desk.