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Protracted crises exist in over 20 countries potentially affecting half a billion people. In these situations, undernourishment is severe, long-standing and almost three times more frequent than in other developing countries. Julius Jackson, Technical Officer of the FAO Agriculture Development Economics Division together with Luca Russo, Strategic Advisor of the FAO Resilience Management Team describe the complexity of protracted crises situations and explain the importance of strengthening resilience for improved food security and nutrition under these conditions. They describe the FAO policy work, including key policy messages. See all videos in the Policy and Governance series :  AR  CH  EN   FR [...]

Agriculture and social protection are fundamentally linked in the context of rural livelihoods in Africa. Poor and food-insecure families depend primarily on agriculture and partly on non-farm income and private transfers for their livelihoods, and are the main target of social protection interventions (FAO, 2015). When embedded within a broader rural development framework, stronger coherence between agriculture and social protection interventions can assist in improving the welfare of poor small family farms by facilitating productive inclusion, improving risk-management capacities, and increasing agricultural productivity – all of which enable rural-based families to gradually move out of poverty and hunger (Tirivayi et [...]

There is increasing recognition at the global level of the role that agriculture and social protection can jointly play in combating hunger and poverty. Efforts are also being made at the country level, in Africa and elsewhere, to bring together these two domains. However, more needs to be done. The full range of benefits to be derived from greater coherence between agriculture and social protection is not yet widely understood, nor are the means through which coherence can be promoted. This document presents a Framework for Analysis and Action with the purpose of filling this knowledge gap. By drawing from [...]

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) on reducing poverty have been met by many countries, yet many others lag behind and the post-2015 challenge will be the full eradication of poverty and hunger. Many developing countries increasingly recognize that social protection measures are needed to relieve the immediate deprivation of people living in poverty and to prevent others from falling into poverty when a crisis strikes. This edition of The State of Food and Agriculture 2015 makes the case that social protection measures will help break the cycle of rural poverty and vulnerability, when combined with broader agricultural and rural development measures.  [...]

يقيّم التقرير السنوي عن حالة انعدام الأمن الغذائي في العالم لهذا العام التقدّم المحرز باتجاه تحقيق الهدف 1 من الأهداف الإنمائية للألفية المعمول بها دولياً والهدف الخاص بالجوع لمؤتمر القمة العالمي للأغذية، ويعكس الخطوات التي ينبغي القيام بها، مع انتقالنا إلى الخطة الجديدة للتنمية المستدامة لمرحلة ما بعد عام 2015. ويستعرض هذا التقرير التقدّم المحرز منذ عام 1990 في كلّ بلد وإقليم، وكذلك على مستوى العالم ككلّ. إلاّ أنّ التقدّم باتجاه تحقيق الهدف 1 من الأهداف الإنمائية للألفية لا يقيّم فقط من خلال قياس مستويات نقص التغذية، أو الجوع، إنما عبر مؤشر ثان – ألا وهو انتشار معدلات الأطفال ناقصي [...]

From 2003, the Zero Hunger Program and subsequently, in 2011, the Brazil Without Poverty Plan, marked a deliberate convergence of the purposes and actions focused on farmers and family farmers in Brazil. This allowed simultaneous access to social policies and polices focused on agriculture and livestock activities, through a permanent set of public policies, such as rural credit, climate and income insurance, technical assistance and commercialization. This happened in parallel to affirmative actions related to gender, ethnicity and rural youth. To deal with such complex themes such as eradicating hunger and extreme poverty, the Federal Government began to integrate traditionally [...]

This publication presents the linkages and synergies between social protection and nutrition in the food and agriculture and proposes recommendations for maximizing the nutritional impact of social protection programmes. The target audience includes professionals working in social protection who wish to know more about how nutrition relates to their work, as well as nutrition experts who wish to know how social protection can contribute to improving nutrition. 

This paper provides estimates of investment costs, both public and private, required to eliminate chronic dietary energy deficits, or to achieve zero hunger by 2030. This target is consistent with achieving both Sustainable Development Goal 2, to eliminate hunger by 2030, and Sustainable Development Goal 1, to eradicate poverty. The study adopts a reference baseline scenario, reflecting a “business as usual” situation, to estimate the additional investment requirements. In this scenario, around 650 million people will still suffer from hunger in 2030. We then estimate the investment requirements to eliminate hunger by 2030. Hunger is eliminated through a combination of [...]

Ending Malnutrition offers key insights from the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) to catalyze follow-up actions across the world. It reviews current evidence on the prevalence of malnutrition and analyzes several salient policy issues crucial for a concerted global effort to end malnutrition – improving food systems at the core of a sustainable nutrition strategy, promoting social protection to improve welfare, including health and nutrition, using fortification and supplementation to address micronutrient deficiencies, and improving access to water and sanitation. The concluding chapter focuses on the key role that multilateral institutions must play in accelerating and sustaining global progress [...]

This publication provides an overview of the most important debates which ensued in the four and a half years of the official writing of the India’s National Food Security Act (2013). The Act is legally binding for national and federal state governments to further extend the outreach of social protection to the country’s population.  These discussions cover several questions about the nature and extent of the state’s duties and possible strategies for food provisioning as part of a larger framework of social protection.  The debates summarized are based on the author’s participation in many of the processes related to the right to [...]