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When designing and evaluating policies and projects for women’s empowerment, appropriate indicators are needed. This paper reports on the lessons learned from two rounds of pretesting and cognitive testing of the project-level Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (pro-WEAI) in a total of five States/Regions in Myanmar. We assess if respondents understand the modules as intended and which questions require modification based on the cultural context. We find that the questions also present in the abbreviated WEAI are generally well understood, particularly on instrumental and group agency. The challenge to respond to hypothetical and abstract questions did become apparent in the domain...
On 27 April, the Myanmar Government published the COVID-19 Economic Relief Plan (CERP) which aims to mitigate COVID-19’s impact on the macroeconomic environment and the private sector and to ease the impact on laborers, workers, and households. The CERP action plan should pay explicit attention to gender discrepancies to avoid unintentional harm or aggravating existing gender inequalities.
Poultry farmers in Myanmar were interviewed by telephone in early June, late June, early July, late July, and August 2020 to determine how their businesses were being affected by COVID-19 related restrictions. The results of those surveys were published in Myanmar Strategy Support Program Policy Notes 11, 13, 19, 21, and 28, respectively. To trace the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their economic activities, a sixth round of the phone survey of poultry farmers was done in November 2020. The sixth round sample included 226 poultry farmers (162 broiler and 64 layer farms) in the Yangon peri-urban area (Ayeyarwady, Bago, and Yangon regions) who had been interviewed in the first five rounds of the survey. The same survey questionnaire was used. This survey round is three months after the August survey round, so most broiler farms should have finished a full production cycle between the two last survey rounds. This Policy Note reports on the results of this sixth survey round.
This paper analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on two types of poultry production systems, broilers and layers, in Myanmar using five waves of telephone surveys from June to August 2020. The surveys were implemented with 269 poultry farms previously surveyed in 2019. The slow supply response of layer farms to increased egg demand after the initial COVID-19 shocks has resulted in higher egg prices for consumers. This, in turn, has affected nutritional intake, making it more difficult for Myanmar to achieve the second Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Within both broiler and layer production systems are found both integrated poultry and fish farms and pure poultry farms. For layer farms, integration of poultry production with fish has provided a buffer against risk; the bankruptcy rate among integrated layer-fish farms was much lower than among pure layer farms. However, such advantages of integration of poultry with fish production are not seen for broiler farms.
Myanmar has endured multiple crises in recent years — including COVID-19, global price instability, the 2021 coup, and widespread conflict — that have disrupted and even reversed a decade of economic development. Household welfare has declined severely, with more than 3 million people displaced and many more affected by high food price inflation and worsening diets. Yet Myanmar’s agrifood production and exports have proved surprisingly resilient. Myanmar’s Agrifood System: Historical Development, Recent Shocks, Future Opportunities provides critical analyses and insights into the agrifood system’s evolution, current state, and future potential. This work fills an important knowledg...
This paper uses evidence from Southeast Asia to challenge current interpretations of quantitative data on individual, formal asset ownership in relation to women’s decision-making power and empowerment. By overlaying quantitative data with a qualitative understanding of gender norms in rural households in Myanmar, we challenge common interpretations that have been assumed to universally reflect women’s empowerment. The paper warns that measures of individual asset ownership and decision-making may be poor indicators of women’s empowerment in Southeast Asia, and that a proper understanding of context is required for appropriate and meaningful interpretation of what have now become standard indicators.
Between April and October 2020, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Michigan State University (MSU), with support from the United States Agency of International Development (USAID) and the Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (LIFT), have undertaken analyses of secondary data combined with regular telephone surveys of actors at all stages of Myanmar’s agri-food system in order to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on the system. These analyses show that the volume of agribusiness has slowed considerably in Myanmar since COVID-19 restrictions were put in place. There is lower demand from farmers for agricultural inputs and mechanization services and lower volumes of produce traded, especially exports to neighboring countries whose borders are closed. All actors in the agri-food system are facing liquidity constraints and experiencing increased difficulties in both borrowing and recovering loans.
Poultry farmers in Myanmar were originally interviewed by telephone in early and late June 2020 to determine how their businesses were being affected by COVID-19 related restrictions. The results of those surveys were published in Myanmar Strategy Support Program Policy Notes 11 and 13, respectively. To trace the continuing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their economic activities, a third phone survey of poultry farmers was done in early July 2020. The third survey included 247 poultry farmers (177 broiler and 70 layer farms) in the Yangon peri-urban area (Ayeyarwady, Bago, and Yangon regions) who had been interviewed for the second round of the survey. The same survey questionnaire was used. This Policy Note reports on the results of the third survey round.
The poultry and pig production subsectors are facing significant financial stress, primarily due to a combination of increasing production costs and declining consumer demand. Among the challenges reported by livestock raisers, the most frequent ones were sickness or death of animals, followed closely by high input prices. The cost of production for poultry and swine doubled over a two-year period, largely driven by rising feed and other input costs. Specifically, the price of 50 kg of broiler chicken feed increased by 61 percent between 2021 and 2022, while the price of 30 kg of pig feed increased by 51 percent during the same period. These significant cost increases have led to a notable d...