What's New

The FAO Food Price Index reached a 26-month high in November and rose almost 10 percent above November 2018 levels. This significant increase was driven mostly by meat and vegetable oil prices.

Join the Food Security Portal (FSP), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), and the CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) in the launch of the global foresight tool Impacts of Alternative Investment Scenarios. The tool was recently developed by IFPRI’s IMPACT model team and the FSP. The Global Foresight tool provides researchers and policymakers with a flexible way to explore the impact of various agricultural investment scenarios on agricultural production, productivity, and hunger for the period 2010-2050.

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 will take major transformations of the agricultural sectors of developing economies. These transformations of food and agricultural systems—or delays in carrying them out—will have direct and indirect implications for multiple SDGs. An important first step is overhauling countries’ policy systems and reorienting them towards evidence-based policy making.

Fourteen percent of the food produced globally is lost during the post-harvest production stage before reaching the retail stage of the food system, according to the newly-released FAO 2019 State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report . While significant, this figure is less than an earlier FAO loss estimate of one-third of all food. Some regional losses are higher, reaching over 15% in North America and Europe and over 20% in Central and South Asia.

For the past three years, the number of people around the world in urgent need of food and nutrition assistance has remained above 100 million, according to the annual Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC). The annual report aims to provide governments, international organizations, and other stakeholders with the data and analysis needed to respond to and prevent the crises that lead to such massive food-insecure populations. In a first-ever mid-year update to the report, GRFC partners provide a revised look at the severity of current global food crises in terms of the number of acutely food-insecure people, as well as the status of the crisis: Improving, deteriorating, or stable.