What's New

Increasing urbanization plays a major role in shifting patterns of food supply and demand and thus in transforming food systems. These transformations carry significant implications for the livelihoods of rural populations, presenting both challenges and opportunities. A new paper published in Food Security examines some of these impacts in Africa south of the Sahara (SSA) and South Asia, as well as the enabling environments needed to help rural communities benefit from the changes.

The CGIAR COVID-19 Hub has released updated policy notes regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on global and regional food systems. This latest series of updates covers several FSP priority countries, including Ethiopia, Nigeria, Malawi, and Bangladesh.

Despite tremendous progress made in the last decade to produce enough food to meet the demands of the growing population, around 811 million people lived in hunger in 2020 and nearly half of the world’s population lacked year-round access to adequate food due to climate change, poverty, and the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report.

This post originally appeared on IFPRI.org, by Swati Malhotra and Rob Vos.

Global hunger has been on the rise since 2014, and the world is not on track to achieve the goal of Zero Hunger (SDG2). If current trends continue without concerted and collaborative actions to tackle the challenge, 840 million people will come under the grip of hunger by 2030. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the situation, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where compounding effects—conflict, economic downturns and shocks, and climate variability—are causing distress.

Our window of opportunity for achieving SDG 2 — eradicating hunger and malnutrition and ensuring access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food for all by 2030 — is closing rapidly. However, far from moving closer to that goal, the world has seen a resurgence of hunger and food insecurity.