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Policy Analysis

What Is the Link Between Hunger and Migration?

In the context of the current refugee crisis—and the rhetoric surrounding international migration—we investigated how international migration is affected by economic growth, hunger and increased agricultural productivity.

By Livia Bizikova, Carin Smaller, David Laborde, Tess Lallemant on June 30, 2017

In the context of the current refugee crisis—and the rhetoric surrounding international migration—we investigated how international migration is affected by economic growth, hunger and increased agricultural productivity. We found that economic growth was the strongest driver influencing migration.

We concluded that donors seeking to help people access economic opportunities in their own country should focus on investing in agriculture and food systems beyond the farm level.

This analysis builds upon our recently published report which found that it would cost on average an extra USD 11 billion per year on top of current public spending between 2015 and 2030 to largely end hunger, part of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2.

We estimated that donors need to provide USD 4 billion of the total, and the remaining USD 7 billion needs to come from poor countries themselves.

The PDF can be downloaded here

Technical Appendix can be downloaded here.