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).

Among children under the age of five around the world, 161 million are stunted, 51 million are wasted, and 42 million are obese, according to the 2015 Global Nutrition Report released today by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington, DC. The report illustrates that malnutrition takes many forms and affects every country on earth. Whereas some solutions for reducing malnutrition are promising, it does not take the same form nor demand the same policy solutions in every country or context.

Ongoing conflict puts Yemen at the top of the list of projected acutely food insecure populations for January 2016, according to the latest Food Assistance Outlook Brief from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) . FEWS NET is a leading provider of early warning and analysis on acute food insecurity, and the Food Assistance Outlook Brief summarizes FEWS NET’s most forward-looking analysis of projected emergency food assistance needs in FEWS NET coverage countries.

Official Development Assistance, or ODA, provides a fundamental source of financing in the poorest and most fragile countries. Current ODA is estimated at $135 billion USD a year, but investment needs in infrastructure alone reach up to $1.5 trillion a year in emerging and developing countries according to the World Bank Group.

This week IFPRI launched a new Spanish-language web portal that focuses on food and nutrition security in Central America, the Food Security Portal for Central America and the Caribbean (CAC-FSP). The objective of the portal is to provide a set of indicators on food and nutrition security and early warning mechanisms as well as opportunities for dialogue among policymakers, researchers, the private sector and others seeking to increase the resilience of the world’s poor to possible food-related crises, including price and climate shocks.

The April edition of the FAO Monthly News Report on Grains was released today, with multiple articles addressing China's grain management system and coverage of record cereal and wheat harvests for Morocco and India, respectively. The report also covers ongoing global and regional trends in grain prices and policies.