Agrifood systems remain highly vulnerable to shocks and disruptions arising from conflict, climate variability and extremes, and economic contraction.
These factors, combined with growing inequities, keep challenging the capacity of agrifood systems to deliver nutritious, safe and affordable diets for all.
These major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition are our “new normal”.
“We have no option but to redouble our efforts to transform agrifood systems and leverage them towards reaching the Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) targets.”
This is contained in The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report released this July as part a series of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
The report is titled: The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), World Health Organization (WHO) Rome 2023, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023.
Urbanization, agrifood systems transformation and healthy diets across the rural–urban continuum.Although the world is recovering from the global COVID-19 pandemic, this is occurring unevenly across and within countries.
On top of this, the world is grappling with the consequences of the ongoing war in Ukraine, which has shaken food and energy markets, according to the report.
“Global hunger is still far above pre-pandemic levels. It is estimated that between 690 and 783 million people in the world faced hunger in 2022. This is 122 million more people than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Nonetheless, the increase in global hunger observed in the last two years has stalled and, in 2022, there were about 3.8 million fewer people suffering from hunger than in 2021.
“The economic recovery from the pandemic has contributed to this, but there is no doubt that the modest progress has been undermined by rising food and energy prices magnified by the war in Ukraine. There is no room for complacency, though, as hunger is still on the rise throughout Africa, Western Asia and the Caribbean.
In 2022, 2.4 billion people, comprising relatively more women and people living in rural areas, did not have access to nutritious, safe and sufficient food all year round.
The persisting impact of the pandemic on people’s disposable income, the rising cost of a healthy diet and the overall rise in inflation also continued to leave billions without access to an affordable healthy diet.
Millions of children under five years of age continue to suffer from stunting (148 million), wasting (45 million) and overweight (37 million).
“Despite progress in reducing child undernutrition – both stunting and wasting – the world is not on track to achieve the associated 2030 targets, and neither is any region on track to attain the 2030 target for low birthweight, so closely linked to the nutrition of women before and during pregnancy. Steady progress is only seen on levels of exclusive breastfeeding,” said the report.
“These numbers and trends may be a considerable disappointment for us, but for the children and people affected, they constitute an underlying fact of their lives, and this fuels our determination to keep finding solutions. Since 2017, when signs of increasing hunger first began to appear, our organizations, through this report, have provided in-depth analysis of the major drivers behind these concerning trends and evidence-based policy recommendations to address them.”
Urbanization, for example, is one such megatrend that features as the theme of this year’s report. By 2050, almost seven in ten people are projected to live in cities; but even today, this proportion is approximately 56 percent.
“Urbanization is shaping agrifood systems in ways we can only understand through a rural–urban continuum lens, encompassing everything from food production, food processing, and food distribution, marketing and procurement, to consumer behaviour.
Due to population growth, small and intermediate cities and rural towns are increasingly bridging the space between rural areas and large metropolises. Hence, in our efforts to end hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in an urbanizing world, we can no longer operate on the traditional assumption of a rural–urban divide.
As the world is urbanisation,” the report noted.For full report go to….
Report: State of Food Security & Nutrition in the World