FAO.org

Intensifying water constraints threaten food security and nutrition. Thus, urgent action is needed to make water use in agriculture more sustainable and equitable. Irrigated agriculture remains by far the largest user of freshwater, but scarcity of freshwater is a growing problem owing to increasing demand and competition for freshwater resources. At the same time, rainfed agriculture is facing increasing precipitation variability driven by climate change. These trends will exacerbate disputes among water users and inequality in access to water, especially for small-scale farmers, the rural poor and other vulnerable populations.The State of Food and Agriculture 2020 presents new estimates on [...]

With the COVID-19 in Jordan under control, the government of Jordan has managed the response proactively and to mitigate potential immediate impacts on the availability of food to the population. Food security among vulnerable Jordanian households has remained largely stable as yet with 15% of households showing a poor or borderline Food Consumption Score (FCS) in 2020 compared to 16% in 2018. Nevertheless the extent of the damage to key components of the food supply chain is still not completely quantified. Also, the pandemic still ongoing globally and in the region, Jordan will have to remain attentive to multiple risks that [...]

This document provides guidance on implementing the Food Insecurity Experience Scale for the purpose of monitoring the impact of COVID-19 on food security. Important considerations are covered such as survey design, method of data collection, translation and linguistic adaptation of the survey module, and preparation of the interview script, among others. Also available in Spanish. Find more COVID-19 related resources here.

Why land rights matter: Tenure is essential to the livelihoods of billions of people where access to land and natural resources can mean the difference between having food and going hungry. People with weak, insecure tenure rights risk losing their means to self-support without access to land, fisheries and forests. When women have weaker tenure rights caused by discrimination in laws and customs, tenure rights can help promote, support and document fair and transparent processes aimed at ensuring improved access to natural resources for all concerned.

One of the main pillars of food security is food supply, which refers to the availability of sufficient quantities of food of appropriate quality, supplied through domestic production or imports. In this paper, we use quantities of commercialized foods from the Supply and Utilization Accounts (SUA) compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) to analyze trends in food available for consumption based on by region and country income level group. Results show that, in general, food groups available for consumption differ across income-level country groups. There are nonetheless evident regional trends. Low-income and lower-middle-income countries have [...]

Parliamentarians can significantly contribute to achieving the right to food at a global, national and local scale, as they play a key role in setting up the enabling legal and institutional frameworks, in allocating appropriate budgets and in monitoring government action on Food and Nutrition Security.The European Parliamentary Alliance against Hunger and Malnutrition, established in 2016, has been and will continue to be instrumental in connecting Members of the European Parliament and in enabling them to engage actively in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. The Alliance provides a platform for policy dialogue and awareness-raising on the right to adequate [...]

This series of e-learning courses assists professionals from all food and agriculture fields in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of nutrition-sensitive programmes, policies and investments. The courses use a scenario-based and experiential learning approach and cover all forms of malnutrition and a diversity of contexts.

The Food and Nutrition Security Impact, Resilience, Sustainability and Transformation (FIRST) Programme represents a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the European Union (EU). In 2018, the partnership agreed on the need to have a policy effectiveness analysis conducted in most of the FIRST countries. As policy implementation rather than formulation is repeatedly raised as one of Pakistan’s challenges, this assessment considered the implementation challenges of specific policy processes relevant to the FAO-EU partnership in the country, rather than the entire suite of relevant policies. It considered the necessary conditions to move forward and [...]

With trade recognized as a means of implementation under Agenda 2030, policy-makers will need to ensure that trade, and policies affecting trade and markets, are taken into consideration as part of their efforts to achieve SDG 2. The five targets that set out the level and ambition of SDG 2, as well as trade itself, often constitute distinct competing policy priorities for governments. It is therefore important that policy-makers identify and recognize areas in which difficult tradeoffs may be needed between competing policy objectives, and identify possible ways in which these can be addressed. Furthermore, while the different targets set [...]

More than 820 million people in the world were hungry in 2018 (FAO, 2019). In sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), there were 239 million undernourished people, with a prevalence of 22.8 percent as measured by the Prevalence of Undernourishment (PoU), a Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) indicator. The target is to bring this prevalence to zero by 2030 (Ritchie et al., 2018). According to the latest Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), 9.2 percent of the world’s population (or more than 700 million people) were exposed to severe levels of food insecurity in 2018, with Africa having the highest level of 27 [...]