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	Social protection schemes hold key to beating world hunger by FAO, IFAD, WFP, agencies   Link between economic inequality and undernourishment highlighted in UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s report on global food insecurity.   If targets to end world hunger by 2030 are to be met, governments and donors in developing countries must spend more on cash transfers to poor farmers, school meals and other social protection schemes, a UN report has said.   Economic inequality, which is particularly acute in rural areas, is a key reason why 795 million people do not have enough food enough to eat, according to a report released by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad).   “What we need is to put in place a more distributive [mechanism] of growth, and we have learned from Latin America a very important tool, which is social protection. Expanding social protection schemes helps a lot to tackle undernourishment,” said the FAO’s director general, Jose Graziano da Silva.   About 150 million people have been kept from falling into extreme poverty because of social safety nets, but roughly 70% of the global population lacks access to some form of social security, the report said. The world’s next development agenda, the sustainable development goals (SDGs), includes a target to “implement nationally appropriate social protection measures” by 2030.   Since 1990, the number of people who do not receive enough nutrients to live an active and healthy life has been cut by 216 million, according to the State of Food Insecurity report, which covers 129 countries in the developing world.   At least 72 countries have met the millennium development goal (MDG) to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of undernourished people, the FAO said. In the past year alone, eight countries – Bolivia, Costa Rica, Laos, Mozambique, Nepal, the Solomon Islands, Suriname and Uzbekistan – met the MDG hunger target, according to the report.   But the global average has failed to drop to half of the 1990 rate, meaning that the world will not meet the hunger goal, said Da Silva.   Development targets should also help people in rural areas to access jobs and education, which will contribute to lifting them out of poverty and create lasting food security, said Ifad’s director, Kanayo Nwanze. “We must invest in rural areas so that our nations can have balanced growth and so that the three billion people who live in rural areas can fulfil their potential,” Nwanze said.   About 80% of poor people depend on vulnerable jobs in the informal economy, according to the report. Promoting enterprise in rural areas of developing countries will help to spread economic growth more evenly, said Josefina Stubbs, Ifad’s associate-vice president. “We need to encourage business in the rural sector as a way of distributing the benefits [of economic growth] to the society.”   Most of the world’s poor live in Asia or Africa, with only a small number in Latin America, the Middle East or the Americas, according to the report. “Across the developing world, the majority of the poor and most of the hungry live in rural areas, where family farming and smallholder agriculture is a prevailing – albeit not universal – mode of farm organisation,” the report said.   China has succeeded in reducing hunger by combining government investment in rural areas with agricultural subsidies and tax exemptions. China accounts for almost two-thirds of the reduction in the number of undernourished people in poor countries since 1990, the report said.   East Asia and Latin America have made the most progress in reducing the amount of hungry people over the past 25 years, according to the FAO. Mostly because of China’s success, east Asia’s hungry population fell from 295 million in 1990 to 145 million in 2016.   Sub-Saharan Africa and western Asia, areas struggling with several ongoing conflicts, have been slow to reduce hunger, the report said. Sustained unrest has wreaked havoc on food security in countries such as Central African Republic, Syria and Somalia. About 19% of the world’s hungry live in areas affected by protracted crises.   More aid needs to be directed towards long-term development projects that aim to boost infrastructure and services that help people afford to buy food. Prolonged crises have diverted 80% of all development aid away from long-term development projects, which are needed to bring about food security, Da Silva said. “We cannot compromise the long-term aid for developing countries, especially for the poorest countries.”   At least 24 African countries are facing food crises, which present serious challenges to meeting the SDG hunger target. About 19 of these countries have been struggling with severe food shortages for at least eight of the past 10 years as a result of internal conflicts.   Da Silva said: “The near-achievement of the MDG hunger targets shows us that we can indeed eliminate the scourge of hunger in our lifetime. We must be the zero hunger generation. That goal should be mainstreamed into all policy interventions and at the heart of the new sustainable development agenda to be established this year.”   We can End Chronic Hunger, writes Jomo Kwame Sundaram the Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organization.   At the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS), heads of government and the international community committed to reducing the number of hungry people in the world by half. Five years later, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) lowered this level of ambition by only seeking to halve the proportion of the hungry.   The latest State of World Food Insecurity (SOFI) report for 2015 by the Rome-based Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), World Food Programme and International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates almost 795 million people—one in nine people worldwide—remain chronically hungry.   The number of undernourished people—those regularly unable to consume enough food for an active and healthy life—in the world has thus only declined by slightly over a fifth from the 1010.6 million estimated for 1991 to 929.6 million in 2001, 820.7 million in 2011 and 794.6 million in 2014.   With the number of chronically hungry people in developing countries declining from 990.7 million in 1991 to 779.9 million in 2014, their share in developing countries has declined by 44.4 per cent, from 23.4 to 12.9 per cent over the 23 years, but still short of the 11.7 per cent target.   Thus, the MDG 1c target of halving the chronically undernourished’s share of the world’s population by the end of 2015 is unlikely to be met at the current rate of progress. However, meeting the target is still possible, with sufficient, immediate, additional effort to accelerate progress, especially in countries which have showed little progress thus far.   Overall progress has been highly uneven. All but 15 million of the world’s hungry live in developing countries. Some countries and regions have seen only slow progress in reducing hunger, while the absolute number of hungry has even increased in several cases.   By the end of 2014, 72 of the 129 developing countries monitored had reached the MDG 1c target — to either reduce the share of hungry people by half, or keep the share of the chronically undernourished under five per cent. Several more are likely to do so by the end of 2015.   Instead of halving the number of hungry in developing regions by 476 million, this number was only reduced by 221 million, just under half the earlier, more ambitious WFS goal. Nevertheless, some 29 countries succeeded in at least halving the number of hungry. This is significant as this shows that achieving and sustaining rapid progress in reducing hunger is feasible.   Marked differences in undernourishment persist across the regions. There have been significant reductions in both the share and number of undernourished in most countries in South-East Asia, East Asia, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean—where the MDG target of halving the hunger rate has been reached.   While sub-Saharan Africa has the highest share of the chronically hungry, almost one in four, South Asia has the highest number, with over half a billion undernourished. West Asia alone has seen an actual rise in the share of the hungry compared to 1991, while progress in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Oceania has not been sufficient to meet the MDG hunger target by 2015.   Despite the shortfall in achieving the MDG1c target and the failure to get near the WFS goal of halving the number of hungry, world leaders are likely to commit to eliminating hunger and poverty by 2030 when they announce the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations in September.   To be sure, there is enough food produced to feed everyone in the world. However, hundreds of millions of people do not have the means to access enough food to meet their dietary energy needs, let alone what is needed for diverse diets to avoid ‘hidden hunger’ by meeting their micronutrient requirements.   With high levels of deprivation, unemployment and underemployment likely to prevail in the world in the foreseeable future, poverty and hunger are unlikely to be overcome by 2030 without universally establishing a social protection floor for all. Such efforts will also need to provide the means for sustainable livelihoods and resilience.   The Second International Conference of Nutrition in Rome last November articulated commitments and proposals for accelerated progress to overcome undernutrition.   Improvements in nutrition will require sustained and integrated efforts involving complementary policies, including improving health conditions, food systems, social protection, hygiene, water supply and education.   * At a higher poverty line over 2.2 billion people live on less than US $2 a day according to world bank figures. Estimates prepared by United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in the 2014 Statistical Yearbook for Asia and the Pacific reveal that the number of people in the region living on less than 1.25 dollars a day fell from 52 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2011 – a reduction from 1.7 billion to 772 million people.   While this is a real improvement, it does not change the fact that too many millions are still eking out an existent on practically nothing, while a further 40 percent of the region’s population, some 933 million people – although not classified as the “poorest of the poor” – are in similarly dire straits, earning less than two dollars a day.   The 2014 annual statistical publication of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) takes an even deeper look at poverty statistics in the region, suggesting that the gains made in the past two decades may not be as bright as they seem.   According to the Bank’s sub-regional overview of declining extreme poverty, East Asia drove the drop in numbers with a 48.6-percent decline, followed by a 39-percent drop in Central and West Asia, 31 percent in Southeast Asia and 19 percent in South Asia.   However, the Bank highlighted three reasons for why the conventional 1.25-dollar poverty line is an inadequate measure of the costs required to maintain a minimum living standard by the poor: “Updated consumption data specific to Asia’s poor; the impact of volatile and rising costs associated with food insecurity; and the region’s increasing vulnerability to natural disasters, climate change, economic crises, and other shocks.”   By increasing the base poverty line to 1.51 dollars per person per day, as well as factoring in the impacts of food insecurity and vulnerability to natural disasters and other shocks, Asia’s extreme poverty rate shoots up to 49.5 percent of the population, or roughly 1.7 billion people.   http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/288229/icode/ http://www.fao.org/hunger/key-messages/en/ http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/food-security http://www.fao.org/righttofood/news-and-events/news-detail/en/c/284369/ http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/resources http://www.fao.org/righttofood/news-and-events/2014-right-to-food-guidelines10/en/ http://globalnutritionreport.org/2014/12/17/the-planetary-crisis-affecting-almost-all-of-us-poor-nutrition/ http://www.fao.org/about/meetings/icn2/toolkit/key-messages/en/ http://www.fian.org/news/newslist/   http://www.ilo.org/global/research/global-reports/world-social-security-report/2014/lang--en/index.htm http://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_310210/lang--en/index.htm http://www.socialsecurityextension.org/gimi/gess/ShowMainPage.do http://www.srfood.org/en/social-protection-2 http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/ http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/Pages/SocialProtection.aspx http://www.fao.org/social-protection/en/ http://www.unicef.org/socialpolicy/index_socialprotection.html http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Poverty/Pages/AnnualReports.aspx http://www.ipc-undp.org/pub/IPCOnePager247.pdf Visit the related web page
	The right to adequate food in international law by FIAN International, agencies   The right to food is a human right and is a binding obligation well-established under international law.   The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 first recognized the right to food as a human right. It was then incorporated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Article 11) adopted in 1966 and ratified by 156 states, which are today legally bound by its provisions.   The most authoritative UN interpretation of the right to food in international law is contained in General Comment No. 12 of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1999):   "The right to adequate food is realized when every man, woman and child, alone or in community with others, has physical and economic access at all times to adequate food or means for its procurement".   States obligations under the right to adequate food   According to the General Comment No. 12, the right to food also implies three types of obligations - the obligations to respect, to protect and to fulfill:   The obligation to respect existing access to adequate food requires States parties not to take any measures that result in preventing such access.   The obligation to protect requires measures by the State to ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access to adequate food.   The obligation to fulfill (facilitate) means the State must pro-actively engage in activities intended to strengthen people"s access to and utilization of resources and means to ensure their livelihood, including food security.   Finally, whenever an individual or group is unable, for reasons beyond their control, to enjoy the right to adequate food by the means at their disposal, States have the obligation to fulfill (provide) that right directly. This obligation also applies for persons who are victims of natural or other disasters.   http://www.fian.org/what-we-do/issues/right-to-food/ http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Food/Pages/FoodIndex.aspx http://www.fao.org/righttofood/en/ http://www.fao.org/righttofood/news-and-events/en/ http://www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe/critical-and-emerging-issues/en/ http://www.srfood.org/en/other-documents-issued http://www.eldis.org/food/index.htm http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=15669&LangID=E Visit the related web page
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