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The global threats of poverty and malnutrition

For decades, the number of people going hungry had been declining. This isn’t any longer the case.

In 2015, the encouraging trend of declining numbers of undernourished people across the world suddenly reversed. Today, with 821 million undernourished worldwide, we are back at the point we were ten years ago. Similarly, despite some progress, there are still 736 million people living in extreme poverty - most of them in rural areas.

But malnutrition embraces overeating, as well as micronutrient deficiencies. The latest figures show that over 670 million adults and 120 million girls and boys are obese, while more than 2 billion people suffer from one or more micronutrient deficiencies.

Unhealthy diets prevent individuals from achieving their potential by threatening their physical, mental, and social wellbeing, and are among the top ten risk factors contributing to the global burden of disease.

Rural communities at risk

Poor and vulnerable rural communities, in particular, face considerable economic and social barriers in accessing varied, safe, healthy and culturally appropriate diets. Rural women and girls are often disproportionately affected by poverty and malnutrition, due to gender-discriminatory social norms and practices.

Small-scale producers in these communities, who play a key role in overcoming these challenges, often have limited access to knowledge, locally adapted seeds and breeding stock, as well as the capital, incentives, and new technologies required to diversify and integrate production, in particular for nutrient-dense foods such as vegetables, fruits, nuts, milk, eggs, fish and meat. Furthermore, they can’t always access adequate social protection programmes, further exacerbating these challenges.

Women food producers are particularly exposed to risk, and lack access to adequate social protection, rural advisory services and productive inputs. Their businesses are all too often less resilient against environmental or economic shocks, such as climate change and price fluctuations.

FAO Project: Enhancing production of, and access to, nutrition-dense food through social protection programmes

An FAO project in Ethiopia, Grenada, Guyana and Kyrgyzstan aims to address these issues across the four countries.

The direct beneficiaries of this project will be poor, food insecure and nutritionally vulnerable family farmer households, especially those headed by women, across the intervention area. Working with development partners at national and local levels, FAO is to ensure these communities have access to income-generating opportunities, enjoy varied and nutritious food which they produce sustainably, and can access strengthened gender- and nutrition-sensitive social protection programmes.

These goals will be achieved through three key actions:

• Promoting productive and sustainable food systems

The project aims to sustainably increase the production of food beyond staple crops, in order to curb malnutrition and provide a healthy, plentiful and varied diet, as well as increased produce for farmers to trade, thus also providing high-quality nutrients to consumers.

To do so, FAO will introduce approaches such as agroecology, which is based in diversified, integrated, resilient, and sustainable production systems. The recently developed Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation (TAPE) will be used to assess progress in this area.

• Scaling up of cash-based interventions and social assistance programmes

By protecting and enhancing the livelihoods of farmers, social protection programmes can drive investment in sustainable agriculture activities, the purchase of agriculture inputs, and the scale-up of small businesses, in addition to supporting household’s wellbeing and food security. A key element is the adoption of a gender-sensitive approach, in order to ensure that social protection programmes are a driver of equality, and do not contribute to the continuation of negative gender norms and relations. By linking social protection with production support, these positive effects on food security, nutrition and production can be further magnified.

The project will introduce and enhance nutrition and gender-sensitive programmes such as Cash+, in which the cash provided to beneficiaries enables them to address their immediate food and other basic needs, while the “plus” component, which can include productive assets and technical training, promotes their engagement in productive activities.

• Facilitating access to markets

The transition to more integrated, diversified and sustainable food systems can be perceived as a risk by farmers. In order to address this issue, the project seeks to establish access to secure markets for smallholder farmers, in which to sell their sustainably produced goods.

This can be done by linking the surplus produce to initiatives such as Home-Grown School Feeding (HGSF), which is designed to provide children in schools with safe, diverse and nutritious food, sourced locally from smallholder producers. By gaining access to stable and reliable markets such those provided by Home-Grown School Feeding, farmers can increase their income, food security and resilience to shocks.

Evidence and lessons learned emerging from these activities and initiatives will be collected and made available in order to inform policies and initiatives aimed at tackling the threat of malnutrition and food insecurity, as well as fighting rural poverty.

Driving progress

Like other FMM projects, the initiatives carried out under this project strive to have a catalytic effect, leading to the development of frameworks and approaches that can be successfully replicated elsewhere.

By adopting the three-pronged approach of sustainably increasing food production, bolstering gender- and nutrition-sensitive social protection tools, and establishing connections between producers and secure markets, the project will enhance the livelihoods, food security and nutrition of vulnerable farming communities across Ethiopia, Grenada, Guyana and Kyrgyzstan.

This project is being led by FAO’s Strategic Programme 2: “Make agriculture, forestry and fisheries more productive and sustainable” and Strategic Programme 3: “Reduce rural poverty”.