The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2018
Publisher: Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN
Date: 2018
Topics: Renewable Resources
Last year, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World marked the start of a new era in monitoring progress towards achieving a world without hunger and malnutrition in all its forms – an aim set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). Addressing the challenges of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms features prominently in the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda: Ensuring access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food for all (Target 2.1) and eliminating all forms of malnutrition (Target 2.2). It is also understood that attainment of SDG2 depends largely on – and also contributes to – the achievement of the other goals of the 2030 Agenda: ending poverty; improving health, education, gender equality and access to clean water and sanitation; decent work; reduced inequality; and peace and justice, to name only a few.
This transformational vision embedded in the 2030 Agenda provides an imperative for new ways of thinking, acting and measuring. For example, the growing global epidemic of obesity, which is increasingly affecting lower income countries and rapidly adding to the multiple burden of malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, also points to the need to re-examine how we think about and measure hunger and food insecurity as well as their linkages with nutrition and health. Fortunately, data gathering and measurement tools are rapidly evolving to meet the monitoring challenges presented by the new agenda.
Last year, this report included several innovations aimed at promoting new ways of thinking about food security and nutrition in the context of the 2030 Agenda and responding to the challenges of the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) Framework for Action and the UN Decade of Action on Nutrition 2016–2025. The scope of the report was expanded to include a set of six nutrition indicators used to monitor World Health Assembly global targets for nutrition and diet-related non-communicable diseases, three of which are also indicators of the SDG2 targets. The report also introduced for the first time a new indicator of food security, the prevalence of severe food insecurity based on the Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES), which is an estimate of the proportion of the population facing serious constraints on their ability to obtain sufficient food.