Food insecurity and malnutrition have become a “new normal” according to the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
QU Dongyu, director-general of the FAO said that the ‘Global Report on Food Crises’, published today (Wednesday, April 24), should serve as a wake-up call, and ensure that we don’t neglect the provision of agricultural aid in emergency situations.
The report shows that food crises are becoming increasingly protracted and underscored the risk that “hard-won development gains are being reversed”, Qu explained.
Food insecurity
The report found that 282 million people in 59 countries and territories in 2023 needed urgent action to reduce food consumption gap
36 million people are in IPC Phase 4, defined as ’emergency, for which urgent action is required to save lives and livelihoods’.
The FAO said that alarmingly, 36 countries have featured in the report for the past eight years, highlighting the difficulty of restoring food security once its absence becomes acute.
FAO’s director-general focused on that as showcasing how agricultural assistance, often deemed a slower-acting approach, should be scaled up in crisis situations.
Qu urged going beyond necessary direct distributions to find more sustainable solutions, in order to go beyond meeting humanitarian needs and reduce them.
Providing seeds, tools and livestock and the means to restart food production at scale is often the most cost-effective way to assure that food reaches the greatest number of people in hard-to-reach areas, according to the FAO.
Often, just a fraction of humanitarian aid for crises is allocated to protect agricultural livelihoods, even though the majority of those facing acute food insecurity live in rural areas, the FAO said.
Priorities to tackle food crises
The FAO’s director-general has flagged three priorities to guide a rethinking of how to tackle food crises.
Firstly, as a way of making better use of whatever resources are available, a better balance needs to be struck between traditional humanitarian assistance and funding for agricultural support, Qu has stressed.
He explained that agricultural aid is humanitarian aid. At the same time, investing in agriculture is part of efforts to consider long-term, sustainable, and innovative solutions that address the root causes of food insecurity.
The director-general highlighted that positive steps in the right direction are being made.
These include: FAO Hand-in-Hand Initiative; the Word Bank’s Food Security and Nutrition Preparedness Plans; and the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) new financing facility to provide rapid-response funding in shock-driven food crises before high levels of acute food insecurity are reached.
The second priority listed by QU is to target supports for agricultural sectors in crisis situations which he said can help reduce eventual emergency distribution needs.
Thirdly, he said the focus must be on the root causes of food crises adding that such an approach can also help transform the world’s agri-food systems to be more efficient, more inclusive, more resilient.