Hungry for results: FAO and IFPRI urge accelerated efforts to wipe out malnutrition

30 Nov 2018 --- With global hunger and malnutrition in all its forms on the rise, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have launched a global conference aimed at urgently accelerating efforts to achieve zero hunger worldwide. 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. Child stunting is a major problem and almost two billion still suffer from hidden hunger or a deficiency of important nutrients. This also includes people who are overweight or obese,” says FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva in a video message to the conference. “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 eradicating malnutrition and hunger, FAO and IFPRI are stressing that the goal is still achievable.

“It is painfully clear that our current pace is not sufficient to end hunger by 2030, but we can still achieve this goal,” says Shenggen Fan, IFPRI Director General. “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 wants to accelerate the sharing of existing specialty knowledge, successful approaches and tools used 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 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.

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

The conference is highlighting the progress 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 programs. 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 program, established in 2003 to provide beneficiaries a wide range of social services – saw hunger and undernutrition nearly eradicated in ten years.

Accelerating the roll-out of technology and better food systems

Worldwide, improvements in technology are helping to deliver better nutrition. For example, boosting the nutritional value of staple foods through fortification or crops themselves through biofortification is helping reduce the incidence of conditions like anemia and improve cognitive development in places such as Zambia and India.

Approaches like precision farming, drip irrigation, conservation agriculture, and the introduction of staples that are resilient to droughts and floods all represent additional examples of powerful tools that can help us produce greater amounts of more nutritious foods in sustainable ways.

The proliferation of new communications technologies and the ability to harness big data, also offer opportunities to scale-up successes significantly to even greater impact.

However, innovation extends far beyond apps, drones or farm machinery. Innovation in agriculture can involve using new social, organizational and institutional processes to support farmers and sustainably intensify production. These can range from building stronger producer self-help groups and extension services, to improving access to markets and credit in pioneering ways, to developing new ways of processing, storage, transport and marketing food. 

Innovation can be decidedly "low tech" – for example leaving stands of trees on farms intact to promote soil health and enhance agroecosystem productivity. Innovations in intervention design can boost their potential impact, like when behavior change communications that encourage the adoption of ideal nutrition and child feeding practices are integrated into social protection programs to improve household nutrition as well as food consumption.

By convening key figures from the worlds of research, policymaking, and development program implementation to share knowledge of the policies, interventions and technologies that have effectively accelerated the elimination of undernutrition, the conference aims to catalyze the next era of rapid reductions in hunger and malnutrition.

“We have the tools and we have the knowledge to eliminate hunger in the next 12 years,” said Fan. “By empowering key actors in policy making, research, and program implementation with those tools and knowledge, we can reach this goal and help millions of people achieve their full potential.”

The IFPRI-FAO Conference on Accelerating the End of Hunger and Malnutrition is taking place in Bangkok and concludes today.