EAT-Lancet 2.0 makes the case that healthy and sustainable food systems must also be just. This Voices asks: what would it take to move from global targets to transformation pathways that are regionally grounded, politically feasible, and avoid deepening existing inequalities? Are there specific design principles, policy interventions, or research frontiers needed to support such a food-system transformation?

PurposeAccess to agricultural extension and crop advisory services is critical, yet, in conflict-affected settings, their delivery and use are poorly understood. This paper has three objectives: first, to assess the distribution and types of agricultural extension services used by farmers in Myanmar; second, to examine changes in service use before and during conflict, focusing on the rise of digital agricultural services; and third, to analyze patterns of inclusion in accessing these services, comparing digital and in-person options.Design/methodology/approachWe use a mixed-method approach for analysis. We rely on primary data from unique, large-scale, and repeated farm surveys conducted in Myanmar. This is complemented by a descriptive analysis of major digital extension platforms and contextual interviews with digital extension providers.FindingsSince the onset of conflict, the use of in-person extension services has declined, while digital services have risen, with over 50 percent of farmers accessing them. Nonetheless, access remains uneven, with better-educated, wealthier, less remote, and more secure farmers benefiting disproportionately from both in-person and digital extension services.Practical implicationsDigital extension services have potential in conflict-affected settings but require targeted interventions to bridge access gaps. Policymakers must address digital literacy, connectivity, and affordability barriers.Theoretical implicationsOur research contributes to the literature by assessing the structure of digital extension services, focusing on their use in fragile settings, and advancing knowledge on the inclusiveness of agricultural extension in conflict-affected contexts.Originality/valueThis study provides timely evidence on digital agricultural advisory services in conflict settings, offering lessons for similar fragile environments globally.

With the intensification and modernization of agriculture in many low- and middle-income countries, farmers are increasingly reliant on agro-inputs - such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides - purchased from small- and medium-sized retailers to boost production. Despite their growing importance, there has been limited research on the roles these agro-input retailers play in transforming agrifood value chains. Drawing on large-scale surveys of farmers and agro-input retailers in Myanmar, we show that retailers often act as one-stop shops in rural communities, providing a range of complementary agricultural services, and serving as the primary source of agricultural extension and credit provision for fertilizer. We also show, using a best-worst scaling experiment, that farmers have low trust in advice from agro-input retailers relative to peer farmers and public extension agents. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of agro-input retailers in driving agricultural transformation. Strengthening retailer capacity to deliver services and bridging the trust gap will be important to realizing their full potential.

Agrifood value chains (AVCs) play crucial roles in food security in fragile and conflict-affected economies where there are widespread challenges and disruptions to business operations, food access, and incomes. Yet, given these challenges, safe data collection is challenging in conflict-affected settings and, as a result, the evidence on the disruptions AVC businesses face is thin. In this paper, we rely on novel panel data from AVC businesses in Myanmar, one of 7 countries in the world with extreme conflict. This short paper documents the disruptions experienced by businesses at several levels of the food supply chain, including farmers, input retailers, crop traders, rice millers, and food vendors. We also provide evidence on the implications for prices by analyzing price changes over this period: farm input and sales prices using farm survey data, food retail using data from food vendors, and dietary cost estimates combining consumption and price data. Our results highlight vulnerabilities in food supply chains in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Potential opportunities to strengthen food supply chains in such settings include ensuring access to banking and financial services; minimizing transportation disruptions to mitigate widening gaps between producer and consumer prices; and maintaining access to fuel and electricity as well as cellphone internet networks. Efforts to support these areas could stabilize food availability and reduce food prices, while also increasing farm-gate shares of food prices thereby supporting rural incomes.

Climate change and conflict are increasingly shaping livelihoods in low- and middle-income countries, with agricultural households among the most directly affected. Yet, empirical evidence on how these stressors are associated with farmers' adaptation strategies and agricultural assets remains limited. Drawing on unique, largescale, nationally representative survey data from farming households in climate-vulnerable and conflict-affected Myanmar, we document broad-based recognition among farmers of significant shifts in weather patterns over the past six years. During this period, we observe a small increase - from a low base - in the adoption of climatesmart agricultural (CSA) practices, but sharper increases amongst larger, better-connected, and more productive farms. Additionally, climate-related risks - most notably droughts - and lagged conflict exposure are each strongly correlated with reduced agricultural land values, suggesting their strong linkages with this key farm asset. We also find that insecurity and weather changes, as well as the adoption of CSA practices, vary significantly across agroecological zones. The spatial heterogeneity in climate impacts, the adoption of CSA practices, and conflict exposure highlights the need for regionally differentiated adaptation strategies, with a focus on smallholders and remote households.

Agriculture is undergoing a new revolution. Technological advances allow drones to perform multiple tasks, including spraying crop protectants, spreading fertilizers, sowing seeds and surveying fields. Use of agricultural drones is growing extremely rapidly, particularly in Asia and Latin America, but has received little attention because it has happened so quickly. This revolution is significant because drones have the potential to enhance agricultural sustainability and reduce health risks by applying inputs more efficiently and safely than conventional methods. Drones also have the potential to raise agricultural productivity and farm incomes, overcome labor scarcity, and support rural livelihoods. But they create tradeoffs, including new environmental and social externalities, and dilemmas around technological sovereignty and data privacy. Prior academic literature on agricultural drones has been largely technical. We review prior literature and diverse non-academic secondary sources to track the extent and characteristics of global agricultural drone diffusion, providing estimates of numbers of agricultural drones in 10 major agricultural producer countries. We analyze drivers of drone diffusion, including technological innovation, falling costs, outsourcing services, and favorable policy environments, and explore emerging evidence of the impacts of drones on farm labor, agricultural efficiency, productivity, and profitability, and occupational health. The paper concludes by setting out an agenda for applied transdisciplinary research on the sustainability and food security impacts of agricultural drones.

The number of farmers residing in fragile and conflict-affected countries is rising globally, yet the impacts of conflict on the economics of inorganic fertilizer in these settings remain poorly understood. We study how conflicts in Myanmar, combined with global fertilizer market disruptions, have affected inorganic fertilizer prices, use, response, and efficiency. We utilize unique nationally representative household panel survey data and a comprehensive approach that employs various analytical methods to examine the nexus between conflicts and fertilizer-related issues. Our findings reveal that greater intensity of violent events is associated with higher prices of major types of inorganic fertilizer, particularly in areas farther from major import locations. These price changes and increases in violent events have suppressed both the likelihood and quantity of inorganic fertilizer usage, leading to decreased rice yield responses at given nitrogen application levels. Panel stochastic frontier analyses, combined with a method addressing the endogeneity of inorganic fertilizer use, suggest a significant decline in fertilizer use efficiency each year since the onset of conflict. The increase in violent events is also associated with the reduced use of extension services, seeds from markets, irrigation, and optimal fertilizer blends, which may partly explain the diminished returns and efficiency of inorganic fertilizer use. Conflict therefore seems to be associated with a change in the economics of inorganic fertilizer use through various impact channels, affecting agricultural performance in these fragile and conflict-affected settings.

Ethiopia is a climate "hotspot" where the variable and changing climate periodically threatens agricultural production, food security, and human well-being. Using two-rounds of Feed the Future program survey data that cover 3,799 farming households in five major regions in Ethiopia, and employing panel data estimation methods, we analyze the potential impact of weather and climate services (WCS) on agricultural productivity and farmers' resilience in Ethiopia. We found that access to WCS increases the productivity of maize and wheat crops by 27 % and 17 %, respectively. These estimates are comparable to or higher than conventional yieldincreasing production technologies such as fertilizer and improved seeds. Despite such a strong productivity effect, access to WCS is limited to only 18 % of the surveyed farmers. This study adds to the existing body of evidence on the significant positive impact of WCS, and affirms the importance of weather and climate information service products to enhance farmers' resilience to climate risk. Further analyses are needed to estimate the value to Ethiopia's smallholder farmers, especially those who are most vulnerable to climate-related hazards, of increasing investment in improving seasonal climate forecasts, mainstreaming weather and climate services in the agricultural extension system, including through National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS), and supporting farmer decision-making with climate-informed digital advisory tools and training.

Agri-food systems are transforming quickly in Africa. An important issue in the transformation process of agricultural production is the role of small farms. While many authors have looked at this question, one aspect that has received little attention is the role of small farms in the production of nutritious foods, an important topic given the low availability and relatively high prices of nutritious foods and the consequent low level of nutrition security in the continent. Using a unique large-scale dataset from Ethiopia-one of the largest countries in Africa that has been transforming rapidly-we look at the production of vegetables and dairy products. We find a strong association between farm size and partial productivity measured in terms of output, value of outputs and profit per hectare/cow, with productivity twice to four times as high for larger farms. These farms have substantially higher input expenditures as well as differences in farm technologies compared to small ones. Our findings have important implications for the debate on the role of small farms and nutritional improvements in the continent.

Weather and climate services (WCS) are particularly important in Sub-Saharan Africa, where weather-dependent agriculture is the main source of livelihood, and where erratic weather patterns and extreme weather events have major impacts on rural livelihoods and food security. However, despite their importance, their effects on the agriculture sector and the overall economy are not well understood. For the case of Ethiopia, we use a computable general equilibrium modeling approach with the latest Ethiopian social accounting matrix data to estimate the potential contribution of WCS to macroeconomic variables, including growth in gross domestic product nationally and by sector. The analysis incorporates results of a separate econometric analysis of household survey data from five major regions in Ethiopia, which showed WCS use is associated with increased agricultural productivity. We estimate that increased agricultural productivity associated with WCS contributes to overall economic growth of more than 6 %, with a likely positive effect on farmers’ resilience to climate variability and change. The positive impact of WCS on agricultural productivity propagate to the overall economy, as evidenced by the considerable positive effect on GDP especially from the more climate sensitive sectors such as agriculture.

Myanmar has experienced a sequence of severe crises beginning in 2019 including the unexpected closure of a principal trade route, COVID-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, and a military coup leading to years of disruptions in the banking and transport sectors, inflation, and conflict. Despite these cascading shocks Myanmar's maize sector experienced robust growth in production and exports. This paper examines the key factors underlying this apparent paradox. Our findings contribute to the small but growing literatures on agri-food value chain (AVC) resilience and adaptation by traders - an area of increasing interest from policymakers and development partners due to its important implications for food security and welfare. Using data from several sources, including rare panel data sets of traders and farmers and key informant interviews, we show that crop traders were central to the resilience of Myanmar's maize value chain during this turbulent period. High global maize prices incentivized traders to adapt and continue trading despite the risks and disruptions, allowing them to perform three critical functions contributing to resilience: (i) market discovery when primary trade routes were closed; (ii) overcoming transportation disruptions and bank closures to move maize from the farmgate to local and export markets; (iii) maintaining flows of credit to farmers throughout the crises in the form of selling inputs on credit and direct cash lending, injecting much needed liquidity amid disruptions in the banking sector and rising input prices. These findings highlight how trader-driven adaptations, supported by favorable prices and returns, sustained the sector's growth through profound economic and political uncertainty.

Remittances are a vital source of external finance in low- and middle-income countries, yet their role in fragile and conflict-affected settings remains poorly understood. Using unique large-scale panel data from both origin households and migrants in Myanmar—a country experiencing prolonged conflict and instability—we examine what drives remittance behavior, when remittances are sent, and how they are used. We find that migrants are more likely to remit following household-level shocks, including conflict, health, and financial hardship, highlighting their role in informal crisis response. However, remittance sending is strongly shaped by migration conditions: migrants with stable employment or formal migration pathways are far more likely to remit, while those facing precarity or debt are less able to do so. While this study highlights the important role remittances play in conflict-affected settings, it also reveals significant gaps in this safety net for many vulnerable households.

We examine the effect of rural institutions on plot-level technical efficiency of teff production. We account for differences in production technology, access to the market, plot characteristics, and weather shocks across plots and investigate the robustness of the effects of rural institutions on technical efficiency across various specifications. Using a large and detailed cross-section of teff plots, we find that teff output could be increased by approximately 25 percent with the available inputs and technology through improved technical efficiency. The magnitude of technical inefficiency is robust to alternative functional forms and variable specifications. Community discussion groups and distance to the nearest agricultural co-operative have a positive relationship with technical efficiency, highlighting their potential to enhance agricultural productivity. However, we find limited evidence on the relationship between co-operative membership, visits with extension and technical efficiency of teff producers. Our results show that when studying the impact of new programs and policies in agriculture, it is important to look beyond just whether farmers are members of co-operatives. We might consider other factors, such as how much access they have to co-operative services. It is crucial for policymakers to consider implementing targeted interventions to share information on best management practices and agricultural technologies in order to address the efficiency gap in teff production.

Rapid growth in drone use is upending expectations but also inducing trade-offs

Wholesalers of agricultural crops have historically received limited attention in the literature on agricultural development, which has a strongly productivist focus. When wholesalers are considered, they are often framed as exploitative, taking advantage of information asymmetries, market failures, and unequal power relations to extract heavy surpluses from farmers. However, there is a growing appreciation that wholesalers may play important roles in facilitating agricultural development and rural transformation. This paper evaluates wholesaler conduct and performance using a survey of 218 maize wholesalers in 12 of the major maize-growing and trading townships of South Shan State, Myanmar and the cities of Lashio and Muse in North Shan. Hybrid maize emerged very rapidly in Myanmar over the past two decades to become a major cash crop, supplying domestic animal feed mills and becoming one of Myanmar's most important exports to China and Thailand. Wholesalers have been central to the development of this supply chain and the sector. Contrary to recent literature from Myanmar that has cast maize wholesalers as exploitative, the survey finds that the rapidly growing wholesaler segment of the maize value chain is highly competitive, rapidly changing with respect to technology, and functions efficiently. Farmers obtaining maize inputs from wholesalers in the form of tied output credit sell their maize at prevailing market rates. The emergence of clusters of maize wholesalers and allied actors such as third-party logistics services occurred spontaneously and symbiotically with the expansion of hybrid maize cultivation, and with each set of actors essential to the emergence of the others.

There is an international consensus that Africans consume less fruits and vegetables (FV), and animal products (AP) than they need for adequate nutrition, and that production and supply chains of these products are constrained. Yet, in this paper, we show that despite these problems, there is a lot of dynamism in demand and supply of these nutrient‐dense products in Africa: (1) macro evidence of “domestic supply booms"—with supply growing as fast as or faster than in Asia and Latin America; (2) only 2–4% of FV, and 10% of AP consumption in Africa is imported, and only about 1–2% of the output of FV and AP is exported: the supply booms have thus been overwhelming domestically sourced, not imported; (3) micro evidence of substantial shares of consumption of FV and AP in total food consumption, similar to Asia's; (4) evidence of rapid development of spontaneous clusters of farms and off‐farm SMEs (output wholesalers, logistics, processors, and agro‐dealers supporting farmers). These clusters are important in fueling the supply booms. Illustrative cases from Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Zambia are presented. We recommend that African governments and international partners: (1) internalize the fact that these spontaneous clusters are forming and already fueling supply booms; (2) note that important drivers of the booms have been government investments in wholesale markets, roads, and other infrastructure like electrification, and agricultural research/extension; (3) leverage and support existing spontaneous clusters and help new ones to form by greatly increasing those three types of public investments.

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Agriculture is rapidly transforming in many low- and middle-income countries - most often driven by the adoption of new agricultural technologies - but changes remain poorly understood in fragile and conflict-affected states. We look at the case of Myanmar, a prime example of such a state. After decades of isolationism and economic stagnation, it opened its economy in the beginning of the 2010s, leading to rapid economic growth. But the COVID-19 health crisis and a military coup in the beginning of 2021 - leading to heightened conflicts, forced displacements, and increased migration - dramatically reversed that outlook. Based on large-scale farm surveys, we find that adoption of labour-saving agricultural technologies - measured by the use of mechanization, herbicides, and direct seeding of rice - increased rapidly over the economic growth period and that the increase surprisingly persisted during the crisis years, but at a slower rate. This uptake was lower, however, for households in the most conflict-affected areas, partly due to differential agricultural input availability. Smallholders and more remote farmers also participated less. This finding suggests an increasing labour productivity gap for remote and conflict-affected smallholders, with important implications for their welfare.

Despite technologies' critical roles in agricultural productivity, evidence is scarce on how conflict affects technology adoption and consequent agricultural productivity, often due to a lack of data in fragile states. Our study contributes to filling this knowledge gap by using unique large-scale data on rice producers before and after a military coup in Myanmar in 2021 that led to a significant increase in conflicts in the country. We find that the increase in violent events including those in adjacent townships significantly changed the rice production function in both factor-neutral and non-neutral ways. Specifically, increased violent events have been generally associated with downward factor-neutral shift in production function, and more importantly, increased output elasticity to agricultural capital (equipment) owned (in other words, reduced output resilience against capital ownership shocks). Our evidence also suggests that this has been led partly through reduced access to agricultural extension services, which would otherwise help farmers maintain productivity even with limited capital ownership by substituting it with human capital and skills. Our results consistently hold for both panel and cross-sectional production functions across various specifications and particularly in Lower Myanmar. Results also indicate that lower mechanization service fees partly mitigate these effects.

Outsource agricultural service enterprises emerged a century ago in high-income countries and in the past several decades in developing regions. We contribute by analyzing and illustrating the emergence of these services from the perspective of phases of the Product Cycle. These services help farmers adapt to international and domestic agrifood value chains: (1) in the commoditization phase, e.g., with rice combine harvesting services in China and Myanmar for domestic and export markets; (2) in the early product differentiation phase into quality traits, e.g., with horticultural services to Ethiopian and Indonesian farmers for urban wholesale markets; (3) in the advanced product differentiation phase into environmental traits, e.g., with A-Z services to help French farmers grow ecolabeled vegetables for supermarkets. These services addressed farmers' shortfalls in information, skills, labor, and equipment. The services are supplied by medium/large farmers with excess capacity say of a combine; by wholesalers who want to reduce search costs and risks; by input "agro-dealers"; and by agribusinesses servicing their outgrowers. In new cases shown in France, outsource firms partner with farm input companies such as Bayer or with robot/drone companies. Governments have - and can do much more to - support the emergence of these services such as in developing regions today through: (1) promotion of a business ecosystem, based on policies of investment in hard and soft infrastructure, favoring the coadaptation of these firms with farmers' needs; (2) policies facilitating access, such as through import liberalization, of equipment and seeds and chemicals.