Data

By: Joseph Glauber, IFPRI
A strong El Niño continued through December, as indicated by above-average sea surface temperatures (SST) across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. The strength and duration of the current El Niño event has raised concerns about global crop prospects and food prices.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the CGIAR research program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) today launched a new initiative to enhance global cooperation on measuring and reducing food loss and waste. The G20 agriculture ministers requested FAO and IFPRI to launch this initiative in Istanbul, Turkey, this past May.

In the face of price spikes, climate change, and other stressors from the national to the global scale, the promotion of resilience has gained traction in the development community as a means of insuring that populations vulnerable to food and nutrition insecurity are equipped with the tools to survive and even thrive in our unpredictable world.

The World Bank released some good news this month regarding extreme global poverty. In the report “Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: Progress and Policies,” the Bank predicts that by the end of 2015, the number of people living in extreme poverty worldwide will drop from 902 million (the 2012 level) to 702 million, or 9.6 percent of the global population.

Among the billions of people on the planet, one in nine are chronically undernourished, according to the 2015 Global Hunger Index (GHI) released this week by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Welthungerhilfe, and Concern Worldwide. The 10th annual edition of the report also finds that one in four children are affected by malnutrition-related stunting (low height for age) and nine percent of children are affected by wasting (low weight for height).