Spending smarter on food and agriculture

FAO

Spending smarter on food and agriculture

Making public spending more effective with FAO's Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT)

Copyright licence

Year of publication 2025

Place of publication Rome, Italy ;

Pages 4 p.

Author FAO

Publisher FAO ;

Product type Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Category Brochure

Edition Second edition

Full item page

Synopsis (short abstract) FAO’s Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT) empowers governments to reallocate their public budgets on food and agriculture, repurposing limited resources into powerful drivers of change to achieve more agricultural transformation, and better food security and nutrition in an era of tight fiscal constraints. PolOpT uses advanced modelling techniques to generate tailored country spending scenarios, showing governments and policymakers insights into optimizing spending across key areas like extension services, fertilizer subsidies, irrigation, mechanization, electrification, rural roads, R&D, and seed subsidies to maximize socioeconomic benefits. Tested in countries like Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda, PolOpT has shown remarkable potential: lifting hundreds of thousands of rural people out of poverty, creating thousands of rural jobs, making healthy diets affordable for millions, and boosting agrifood output by optimizing agrifood budgets. The tool doesn’t stop at socioeconomic transformation. PolOpT can now optimize agrifood policies to align with mitigation and land restoration and protection efforts, in alignment with global environmental commitments like the Paris Agreement, the Global Biodiversity Framework, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, Nationally Determined Contributions, National Adaption Plans, and efforts to combat desertification, among others. With PolOpT, governments can better navigate fiscal pressures on the public purse while achieving transformative impacts through smarter, more strategic spending on food and agriculture.

Also available in:

Spanish

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

Brochure, flyer, fact-sheet

Brochure
Spending smarter on food and agriculture
Making public spending more effective with FAO's policy optimization tool
2024

Also available in:

French
Spanish

FAO’s Policy Optimization Tool (PolOpT) empowers governments to reallocate their public budgets on food and agriculture, repurposing limited resources into powerful drivers of change to achieve more agricultural transformation, and better food security and nutrition in an era of tight fiscal constraints.PolOpT uses advanced modelling techniques to generate tailored country spending scenarios, showing governments and policymakers insights into optimizing spending across key areas like extension services, fertilizer subsidies, irrigation, mechanization, electrification, rural roads, R&D, and seed subsidies to maximize socioeconomic benefits.Tested in countries like Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Uganda, PolOpT has shown remarkable potential: lifting hundreds of thousands of rural people out of poverty, creating thousands of rural jobs, making healthy diets affordable for millions, and boosting agrifood output by optimizing agrifood budgets.The tool doesn’t stop at socioeconomic transformation. In 2025, PolOpT will also integrate climate, biodiversity and land-restoration goals, reallocating agrifood spending to factor in global environmental commitments like the Paris Agreement, the Global Biodiversity Framework, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, Nationally Determined Contributions, National Adaption Plans, and efforts to combat desertification, among others. With PolOpT, governments can better navigate fiscal pressures on the public purse while achieving transformative impacts through smarter, more strategic spending on food and agriculture.
Book (series)

Flagship

Repurposing agriculture's public budget to align healthy diets affordability and agricultural transformation objectives in Ethiopia
Background paper for The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022
2022

Also available in:

No results found.

Agricultural transformation has been ongoing for decades in Ethiopia where the agenda to improve nutrition has also gained momentum. This paper assesses ways in which the government could coherently pursue the objectives of reducing the cost of the least cost healthy diet for Ethiopians and achieving faster inclusive agricultural transformation (IAT), for example by increasing agrifood output, creating rural off-farm employment and reducing rural poverty. The main finding is that pursuing IAT objectives also allows reducing the cost of the least-cost healthy diet. Ethiopian policymakers may consider repurposing the budget for agriculture to pursue IAT objectives as suggested in this paper in order to increase value for public money, not only in terms of agrifood output growth, job creation and poverty reduction, but also in terms of increasing the affordability of healthy diets.
Book (stand-alone)

Technical book

Modelling the impacts of policy interventions for agrifood systems transformation in Indonesia
Governance and policy support: Report
2024

Also available in:

No results found.

The Government of Indonesia and FAO have recognized the need for thorough analysis and modelling of Indonesia’s agrifood systems to support agrifood systems transformation efforts in the country. This is needed to provide a better understanding of the governance context in agrifood systems, including the political economy dynamics influencing performance, as well as to identify synergies and trade-offs across different policy goals and optimal policy mixes for achieving multiple policy objectives.In this regard, FAO facilitated a project to pilot an innovative approach to modelling for food systems transformation. This modelling approach was developed and implemented by a team of researchers from IFPRI, IIASA, IISD and Christian-Albrechts- University of Kiel. It uses three different economic models to generate insights that can assist Indonesian policymakers in developing technically sound and politically feasible policy interventions for agrifood systems transformation.This report provides context for agrifood systems transformation in Indonesia and describes the overall modelling approach before synthesizing the results of the individual modelling activities and distilling these into the overall findings of the modelling. It concludes with implications from these findings for policymaking for agrifood systems transformation in Indonesia and suggestions for the next steps.The results of this modelling and the insights drawn from these results are expected to support efforts to translate Indonesia’s commitments on agrifood systems transformation into concrete policy interventions and to inform medium- and long-term development planning by the Indonesian Government.