FAO in North America

Publications

The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.
The document summarizes the report that, based on a review of more than 250 studies, demonstrates the importance and urgency of climate action to protect the forests of the indigenous and tribal territories of Latin America as well as the indigenous and tribal peoples who protect them. These territories contain about a third of the continent's forests. That's 14% of the carbon stored in tropical forests around the world; These territories are also home to an enormous diversity of wild fauna and flora and play a key role in stabilizing the local and regional climate.
The FAO-WFP Hunger Hotspots report is a forward-looking, early-warning analysis of countries and situations, called hotspots, where acute food insecurity is likely to deteriorate over the coming months. These hotspots are identified through a consensus-based analysis of key drivers of food insecurity, and their likely combination and evolution across countries and regions. Looking at the outlook period of March–July 2021, there are 20 countries and situations where there is a likelihood of further deterioration in acute food insecurity, due to multiple drivers of hunger that are interlinked or mutually reinforcing. These are primarily conflicting dynamics, economic shocks, the socio-economic impacts of COVID19, weather extremes, and the diffusion of plant pests and animal diseases.
On top of a decade of exacerbated disaster loss, exceptional global heat, retreating ice and rising sea levels, humanity and our food security face a range of new and unprecedented hazards, such as megafires, extreme weather events, desert locust swarms of magnitudes previously unseen, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agriculture underpins the livelihoods of over 2.5 billion people – most of them in low-income developing countries – and remains a key driver of development. At no other point in history has agriculture been faced with such an array of familiar and unfamiliar risks, interacting in a hyperconnected world and a precipitously changing landscape. And agriculture continues to absorb a disproportionate share of the damage and loss wrought by disasters. 
This brief provides an update on the status of the study and shares emerging insights on the need for better data collection and analysis, and additional monitoring capacity to improve our collective understanding of small-scale fisheries. This is critical to increasing government attention and improving policy responses and outcomes for the sector.