What's New

On June 18-19, leaders of the G20 will meet in Los Cabos, Mexico to continue addressing global challenges such as food security and food price volatility. The 2011 G20 Summit led to important steps to reduce price volatility, including the creation of the Excessive Food Price Variability Early Warning system and the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) . This year's summit will need to expand upon these steps in order to reach the goals of reduced volatility, poverty reduction, and global food security.

FEWS NET has released its April Food Price Watch, citing stable prices throughout much of Africa and Central America. The Sahel region saw relatively stable cereals prices due to food assistance interventions and successful transport from surplus areas. In East Africa, staple prices remained generally stable, though high; some areas in this region saw seasonal increases.

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Read the Annex.

The 2011 Horn of Africa food crisis reinforced the need for governments and international organizations to be able to react quickly to ongoing humanitarian crises such as drought and famine. In particular, emergency food supplies are critical to mitigate the effects of negative weather events and price shocks. Such supplies must be maintained and used effectively, however, to prevent further disruption and volatility in both global and local food markets.

In recent years, the world has faced continuing food security challenges. The food price spikes of 2007-2008 and 2010-2011 brought lasting impacts in the form of increasingly high food prices and price volatility, overwhelmingly harming the world's poorest producers and consumers. Guarding against price volatility to protect the world's most vulnerable populations will require restructuring global agricultural and financial markets, a need that global leaders are now beginning to recognize and address.

The Minister of Finance of an African country needs to reallocate the country’s public investment to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of halving the proportion of the poor and hungry by 2015: Should the minister increase investment in health and education, with the view that a future productive labor force can lift itself out of poverty? Or shift a greater share of the public budget to support agricultural productivity directly, as the vast majority of the poor relies on agriculture as their main livelihood?