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This document summarizes the online consultation Promoting sustainable food systems for healthy diets in Europe and Central Asia: the key role of school food and nutrition programmes, which was held on the FAO Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN Forum) from 7 November to 18 December 2017. See all ongoing and past discussion on the Global Forum on Food Security and Nutrition • FSN Forum   Also available in Russian.

The technical note describes a novel approach to measure changes in the affordability of nutritious diets in low-income settings, using price indexes to monitor how trade policy or market infrastructure and other factors influence the cost of reaching a standard threshold of dietary diversity.  Preliminary results for a new Cost of Diet Diversity price index in Ghana are provided. 

The international community is committed to ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition worldwide by 2030. While much progress has been made, conflict and human-induced and natural disasters are causing setbacks. This year’s The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World warns that the long-term declining trend in undernourishment seems to have come to a halt and may have reversed, largely on account of the above-mentioned factors. Meanwhile, though progress continues to be made in reducing child malnutrition, rising overweight and obesity are a concern in most parts of the world. These and other findings are detailed in the 2017 edition of The State of [...]

This note provides a structured review of adoption trends of national policies aimed at promoting healthier diets and collates evidence on their effectiveness. We limit our focus to evidence exploiting data collected after the policy implementation, and using appropriate counterfactual methods to identify the policy effect. See all Trade Policy Technical Notes  

The purpose of this guidance note is not to recommend policies to prevent or reduce migration, but rather to focus on how to increase policy coherence for mutually beneficial migration and food security and nutrition outcomes, and to address the root causes of migration, to ensure safe, orderly and regular migration and harness its developmental potential for food security and nutrition.  The guidance note outlines key questions to address the interlinkages between rural migration and food security and nutrition and provides examples of positive and negative impacts of various policy interventions to illustrate the importance of key policy shifts. The following [...]

Trade in agricultural products is expected to continue to increase over the coming decades and will therefore influence the extent and nature of food security and nutrition across all regions of the world. The challenge is how to ensure that the expansion of agricultural trade works for, and not against, the elimination of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Trade policies affect levels of agricultural trade, which in turn affect availability of food in domestic markets, food prices and incomes, along with other important variables that ultimately affect food security and nutrition outcomes. The impact of trade policies on various aspects of food security and nutrition has given rise to [...]

The relationship between trade and food security is attracting increased attention on both the trade and development agendas, with trade recognized as one of the means for achieving the SDGs. The linkages between these concepts are highly complex and have been subject to intense debates. While on the one hand, agricultural trade is considered to balance food deficits and surpluses and broaden consumer choice, on the other, it is also implicated in exposing small-scale value chain actors to greater competition, and speeding up a nutrition transition.   This course seeks to strengthen capacities of agricultural and trade sector stakeholders to: Assess the challenges [...]

This video tells the story of Mehaou, an inspiring Nigerien farmer and grandmother who has overcome many challenges to provide for her family - including rearing, breeding and selling goats.  FAO and the ASTF fund are supporting small farmers to invest and diversity their incomes to create decent employment opportunities. 

Since the 1990s, rural transformations have helped millions of people to rise out of poverty while remaining in rural areas. This underscores an important fact: revitalizing rural economies helps create jobs for rural people, offering an alternative to those who might turn to migration in search of a better life.  However, these rural transformations have not happened everywhere.  For the countries that lag behind, The 2017 State of Food and Agriculture argues that it is not too late. By tapping into the potential of food systems and recognizing the role of small cities and towns in integrated rural-urban planning, inclusive transformations are [...]

Measuring food insecurity through people's experiences The Voices of the Hungry project has launched a tool called the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) which can be used to gather information about the adequacy of people’s access to food by asking them directly about their experiences. National institutions can use the FIES to obtain data-based evidence about the distribution and severity of food insecurity that contributes to building political will and implementing policies to effectively realize the human right to adequate food.