FAO Rome | 24/07/2024
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the responsibility of all countries. Our five organizations support transformative efforts to progress towards a world free from hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. We are encouraged by the commitment of national governments, partners worldwide, and the global community towards this common goal.
While we have made some progress, improvements have been uneven and insufficient. We have seen improvement in more populous countries with growing economies, but hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition continue to increase in many countries around the world. This affects millions of people, especially in rural areas, where extreme poverty and food insecurity remain deeply entrenched. Vulnerable populations, particularly women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples, are disproportionately affected. If past trends continue, millions of people will still be undernourished by 2030, millions of children will still be affected by various forms of malnutrition, and the world will still be falling short of reaching the global nutrition targets.
Conflict, climate variability and extremes, economic slowdowns and downturns, lack of access to and unaffordability of healthy diets, unhealthy food environments, and high and persistent inequality continue to drive food insecurity and malnutrition worldwide. The policies and investments needed to transform agrifood systems and address these drivers along the rural-urban continuum have been identified in previous editions of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. In preparing for this year’s report, we wanted to address the reasons why such policies and investments have not been implemented at scale.
A central reason is finance and financial inclusion, which are among the means of implementation of the SDGs and need more consistent political commitment. The countries with the highest levels of food insecurity and multiple forms of malnutrition, and those affected by the major drivers of these problems, are the countries with the least access to financing.
Our five organizations are committed to taking comprehensive stock of how much financing for food security and nutrition is available globally, and how much more is needed to support the policies and investments necessary to address all the causes and major drivers of food insecurity and malnutrition along the rural-urban continuum.
This report provides a definition of financing for food security and nutrition and the guidance to implement it. To support such implementation, our five organizations commit to advocating for, and supporting, data development for a better global accounting system of financing for food security and nutrition.
Estimating the gap in financing for food security and nutrition and mobilizing innovative ways of financing to bridge it must be among our top priorities. Policies, legislation, and interventions to end hunger and ensure all people have access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food (SDG Target 2.1), and to end all forms of malnutrition (SDG Target 2.2) need significant resource mobilization. They are not only an investment in the future but also our obligation. We strive to guarantee the right to adequate food and nutrition for current and future generations.
In the run-up to the Summit of the Future 2024, and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development in 2025, the theme of this year’s report is particularly timely. We hope that governments, partners, and stakeholders will be inspired by, and act upon, the report’s concrete recommendations on how to source and make better use of financing to achieve Zero Hunger.
We also hope that the calls made in this report are noted and discussed in the relevant intergovernmental processes supporting the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, including the Financing for Development Forum.
Qu Dongyu, FAO Director-General
Alvaro Lario, IFAD President
Catherine Russell, UNICEF Executive Director
Cindy Hensley McCain, WFP Executive Director
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General
See here the interview with FAO Chief Economist Máximo Torero on the SOFI 2024 report
