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The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report (SOFI) was just released. It is an annual analysis of our progress toward achieving food and nutrition security for all people in the world.
And the report puts it simply: When it comes to alleviating hunger and improving food security, “the world is still far off track,” and “improvements have been uneven and insufficient.”
Global hunger levels have failed to decrease for three consecutive years, the report finds, with about 1 in every 11 people having gone hungry in 2023. By 2030, the year by which the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals had aimed to fully end hunger, the SOFI report estimates that 582 million people worldwide will still be chronically undernourished.
“These hunger figures are a major wakeup call,” said Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Co-Chair of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food). “Building climate-resilient food systems is now a life-or-death matter.”
The progress that has been made is fragmented geographically, according to the report. In Latin America and the Caribbean, “notable progress” has been made on food security efforts—unquestionably good news—but food security rates are stagnating in Asia and actually getting worse in Africa. Worldwide, too, every year since 2017, the cost of healthy diets has been consistently getting more expensive.
“This stark reality reflects deeply rooted global inequality, which is exacerbated by an outdated financial system—one that urgently needs to be reexamined and overhauled to facilitate a more inclusive approach to financing that eliminates disparities,” said Ambassador Dennis Francis, President of the 78th Session of the U.N. General Assembly.
This year’s SOFI report focuses primarily on “financing to end hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition,” and some of the numbers are mind-boggling. The change we really need—a network of global policies that devote financial resources toward providing affordable, healthful, nourishing diets for billions of people—could cost more than US$15 trillion. Just ending undernourishment itself would take investments in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
But the cost of ignoring hunger is way more expensive. The report reminds us that “not bridging this gap will result in social, economic and environmental consequences requiring solutions that will also cost several trillion [dollars].”
“We know there is money. We just need new and innovative ways to mobilize it,” says Alvaro Lario, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.
So why aren’t we seeing financial resources flow toward these vital projects?
The answer, largely, is risk: Private investors are concerned that financing food system transformation is too risky, so they would rather put their money into investments they view as safer bets to generate profitable returns.
We need to demonstrate what we know to be true: That investing in a more sustainable future is profitable!
Most urgently, we need stronger accountability. Because of poor transparency in our current financial landscape, food system investments can appear more risky than they actually are. More reliable data would go a long way toward reinforcing the “investment case” for food and nutrition interventions and would help hold decision-makers accountable for acting sustainably.
We can also help attract investment by bolstering partnerships between public investments like national commitments, private sector engagement, and philanthropy. This approach, called blended finance, can help create a more resilient financial structure, spread out the risk, and powerfully demonstrate the broad base of support that exists for food system change.
I’m optimistic about the groups that are already working hard to facilitate these collaborations, like the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the Good Food Finance Network, Food Systems for the Future, and the Forum for Farmers and Food Security (3FS). It’s good to see this featured at major events like the recent London Climate Action Week and COP28 last year, too, where we heard from organizations like the ClimateShot Investor Coalition and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change.
To take a metaphor literally: To build a future where billions of people around the globe can access nourishing diets, we need to put our money where our mouth is.
And we need to do it now.
When we talk about building coordination for more investment into food and agriculture systems, we can’t only be thinking about money on a global scale, either.
How can each of us, in our own communities, help build bridges between local government, advocates, and civic boosters? Email me at danielle@foodtank.com, and let’s continue to discuss ways to build stronger food economies that start right in our neighborhoods.
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Photo courtesy of Gowtham AGM, Unsplash
