Accelerating the end of hunger and malnutrition – a global event

Nations urged to accelerate efforts to wipe out hunger and malnutrition. With rising levels of global hunger putting the  goal of ending malnutrition in all its forms by 2030 in serious jeopardy, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) organized in Bangkok (Thailand) a global conference aimed at urgently accelerating efforts to achieve Zero Hunger worldwide.

After decades of impressive reductions in the numbers of undernourished people, hunger is again on the march. According to the latest report published jointly by FAO and four other UN agencies, about 820 million people on the planet are malnourished.

“This is the third consecutive year that progress in ending hunger has stalled and now has actually increased. More than 820 million people are hungry and many more are malnourished. Child stunting is a major problem and nearly two billion still suffer from hidden hunger or a deficiency of important nutrients. This also includes people who are overweight or obese,” said FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva.

Pointing out that the number of hungry and malnourished people in the world has gone back up to levels last seen ten years ago, he added: “After decades of gains in fighting hunger, this is a serious setback and FAO and the UN sister agencies, together with member governments and other partners, are all very concerned.” While there are big challenges in reaching Zero Hunger, FAO and IFPRI are stressing that the goal is still achievable.

But there is no time to waste

“After many years of tremendous global progress in reducing hunger and malnutrition, it is painfully clear that our current pace is not sufficient to end hunger by 2030, but we can still achieve this goal,” said Shenggen Fan, IFPRI Director General and member of the SUN Lead Group. “Many countries – from China, to Ethiopia, to Bangladesh, to Brazil – have achieved remarkable reductions in hunger and malnutrition, and those successes hold important lessons for the places currently struggling to make significant progress.”

The conference, attracting delegates primarily from Africa and Asia is providing a platform to accelerate the sharing of existing specialty knowledge, approaches and tools that have led to success in many countries so others can learn, adapt and accelerate their own work to reduce hunger and malnutrition in sustainable ways.

Ending hunger and malnutrition by the numbers

While Africa continues to be the hungriest continent per capita, the Asia-Pacific region has the highest total number of undernourished – more than 500 million by FAO estimates.

The size of the global challenge means it must be addressed meaningfully and immediately. For example, the Asia-Pacific region is home to more than 60 percent of the world’s undernourished, and in order for it to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 the countries of the region need to collectively lift more than 110 000 people out of hunger each and every day for the next 12 years.

The urgency of the task at hand cannot be overstated – and ending undernutrition is more complex than many realize. The rise in global hunger is witnessed alongside an increase in obesity, which brings with it an entirely different set of health and economic challenges for the world now and in the future.

SUN Annual Progress Report 2018

In the margins of the conference the SUN Movement launched its 2018 Annual Progress Report. The report analyses global, regional and national malnutrition trends across the Movement’s 60 member countries and explores some of the reasons why progress towards eliminating all forms of malnutrition, for everyone, everywhere, has remained slow despite important gains in reducing stunting seen since 2000.

The report, which takes a regional approach for the first time, also looks at the ‘makers and markers’ of good nutrition regionally and nationally, in addition to progress seen towards ensuring the best possible enabling environment in countries for actions to take hold. It highlights gender equality, sustainable food systems and adolescence as a second critical window of opportunity to ensure healthy and prosperous futures for all. It also explores the way forward towards the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals and the World Health Assembly nutrition targets, by 2030. Read the report here – SUN Annual Progress Report 2018.

@GerdaVerburg: “@SUN_Movement will encourage food, agriculture & nutrition actors to integrate a sustainable and nutrition sensitive food systems approach into national nutrition plans” #SUNreport2018 https://t.co/Jkigl8D2dL #AcceleratingZeroHunger @IFPRI @FAO pic.twitter.com/zKkWemgHpb

— Scaling Up Nutrition (@SUN_Movement) November 29, 2018

@ShenggenFan “The @SUN_Movement has to be everyone’s movement: youth movement, parents movement, grandparents movement… and don’t forget elderly people like me!” #SUNreport2018 pic.twitter.com/ThQuOS4ONL

— Scaling Up Nutrition (@SUN_Movement) November 29, 2018

Leveraging good public policy and knowledge to accelerate the arrival of Zero Hunger

The conference is highlighting how great strides have been made in many countries in reducing hunger and malnutrition, rapidly and sustainably, through improvements in public policies, focused investments and the harnessing of new technologies.

Bangladesh, for example, has achieved one of the fastest reductions in child underweight and stunting in history, largely by using innovative public policies to improve agriculture and nutrition. Policies supporting agricultural growth helped increase agricultural production, while other policies supported family planning, stronger health services, growing school attendance, greater access to drinking water and sanitation, and women’s empowerment. Together, these policies reinforced each other to create an environment of improved food security and nutrition for millions of Bangladeshis.

Economic growth in China lifted millions out of both hunger and poverty, while Brazil and Ethiopia transformed their food systems and diminished the threat of hunger through targeted investments in agricultural research and development (R&D) and social protection programmes. Starting in the mid-1980s and continuing over two decades, crop production in Brazil grew by 77 percent and that — combined with the country’s Fome Zero programme, established in 2003 to provide beneficiaries a wide range of social services — saw hunger and undernutrition nearly eradicated in just ten years.

Similarly, Ethiopia’s large-scale investments in agriculture have led to substantial growth in the production of cereals and the availability of food, while the creation of the Productive Safety Net Programme provides food and/or cash to needy households, which are direct for the most needy and conditional on a work requirement for others. These investments, combined with large public expenditures in health and education, have dramatically reduced hunger and undernutrition, shifting the international image of Ethiopia from victim of frequent famines to development success story.

Global Nutrition Report 2018

The GNR 2018 was also launched at the IFPRI-FAO Conference. The 2018 Global Nutrition Report shares insights into the current state of global nutrition, highlighting the unacceptably high burden of malnutrition in the world. It identifies areas where progress has been made in recent years but argues that it is too slow and too inconsistent. It puts forward five critical steps that are needed to speed up progress to end malnutrition in all its forms and argues that, if we act now, it is not too late to achieve this goal. In fact, we have an unprecedented opportunity to do so.

The 2018 Global Nutrition Report: shining a light to spur action on nutrition – SUN Website