Business Talk with David Laborde
We are delighted to welcome David Laborde , Director of the Agrifood Economics and Policy Division , The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for a Business Talk on Thursday, November 21, who will talk about "Addressing the joint food security and climate challenges using the economist toolbox: an illustration with the FAO Global Roadmap to achieve SDG2 without breaching 1.5C".
Summary:
In the age of polycrisis (climate change, conflicts, economic shocks, etc.), the FAO Global Roadmap has developed a framework of how agrifood systems should address food security and nutrition needs and facilitate many actions aligned with mitigation, adaptation, and resilience objectives under the larger umbrella of climate action.The FAO Global Roadmap is both a theory and instrument of change to guarantee we can deliver good food for all, today and tomorrow. The FAO Global Roadmap aims to bring a constructive, solution-oriented approach, showing that without efficient, sustainable and inclusive transformation it will not be possible to address these goals. To achieve such challenges, and convince all stakeholders, policy makers, the private sector and the civil society to take action, mobilizing state-of-the-art tools and evidence is an absolute need. Hopefully, economic sciences, when combined with natural sciences, provide key tools to achieve these objectives. During the presentation, I will present the FAO Global Roadmap and identify the ranges of methods and instruments that are needed to support such effort at the macro and micro level: applied General Equilibrium modelling, household level analysis, RCTs, political economic, systematic reviews.
Biography :
David Laborde is the Director for Agrifood Economics division at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. He has been leading the division since February 2023. In this role, he supervises a number of flagship publications, such as the State of Food Security and Nutrition (SOFI) or the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) and leads the work of the division on policy monitoring, policy reform, and realignment of incentives to support agrifood system transformation. He also provides leadership on two priority areas for the institution: resilience and bioeconomy.
Before joining FAO, David Laborde worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute of the CGIAR in Washington D.C. for 16 years as part of the Markets, Trade, and Institution Division. He led the research theme on Macroeconomics and Trade and was also a co-director of the Ceres2030 project.
David Laborde’s research interests include food security and nutrition, especially in the context of globalization and climate change. He has worked extensively on measuring and modelling domestic and border farm and food policies in a general equilibrium context, as well as on reforms of these policies facing environmental (climate change, biofuels, sustainability) and social (poverty) issues. Since 2015, he has been focusing on costing the roadmap to achieving SDG2 in a globalized context while considering the role of goods, capital, and migration flows while delivering on key climate actions.
David Laborde has developed a number of computable general equilibrium models, in particular, the MIRAGE and MIRAGRODEP models, and databases such as MAcMapHS6 on tariffs as well as TASTE software. He has been a contributor to the GAP database and a GTAP research fellow since 2005. For his contributions, he received the Alan Powell award in 2018.
Throughout his career, David Laborde has published extensively, having more than 150 publications, and edited a number of books and high-level policy reports.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-laborde-48708827
Business Talk followed by a Cocktail Meet up!