Evidence-Based Research

Cross-posted from IFPRI.org and Tim Thomas' Much Ado About Something blog
By IFPRI Senior Research Fellow Alex De Pinto

Last week, India’s executive branch passed the historic National Food Security Bill (NFSB), an act that will dramatically increase the number of people who receive food subsidies from the government. While India’s existing food distribution system, the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS), is already enormous, the NFSB proposes to increase coverage to 75% of India’s rural population and 50% of the urban population – a whopping 800 million people.

A new initiative, the Community for Zero Hunger, was launched this week. It will identify the greatest gaps that remain in reducing hunger and malnutrition, and leverage the private sector to help fill those gaps at scale.

The 2013 G8 Summit is fast approaching, and development actors around the world are pressing for malnutrition to take center stage at the talks. In the lead-up to the summit, The Lancet , one of the world's most prestigious medical journals, has released a new series on maternal and child malnutrition . This latest series continues the discussion generated by the journal's 2008 series on nutrition, which culminated in the creation of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) movement and recent increased focus on the importance of a child's first 1,000 days.

West Africa is on the cusp: after years of stagnation and decline, the region has seen steady growth for nearly two decades, and is moving from recovery to transformation