Overview of the World Food Situation - Food Security

At the October 2003 meeting of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), Joachim von Braun, IFPRI Director General, addressed the current world food situation beginning with the following statement.

From the Introduction

The Broad Context of Food SecurityWe have come to a major crossroads for the world food situation. On the one hand, without significant changes in policies, public investments, and institutions, we simply will not achieve the 1996 World Food Summit goal—reaffirmed at the 2000 Millennium Summit and again last year at the World Food Summit: five years later—of reducing the number of our fellow human beings who are food insecure by at least half by no later than 2015. On the other hand, there are some encouraging indications that policymakers in both low- and high-income countries have heard this message and are prepared to do something about it.

Over the past two decades, the world has made remarkable progress in increasing food production and reducing food insecurity. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the number of food-insecure people in developing countries fell from 920 million in 1980 to 799 million in 1999 (the last year for which data are available), while the proportion of people living in food insecurity dropped substantially, from 28 to 17 percent. Moreover, global food production at present would be sufficient to provide everyone with his or her minimum calorie needs if the available food were distributed according to need.

But progress slowed considerably during the 1990s. And if China is excluded from consideration, the number of food-insecure people in the rest of the developing world increased by 50 million during the course of the decade. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the population living in hunger jumped nearly 20 percent, with 30 million more food-insecure people by the end of the decade.

Today we must recognise that incremental improvement in the world food situation is a more challenging task than what we have faced in the past. Freeing the next 400 million people from hunger will require more complex investments, innovations, and policy actions than those needed to free the previous 400 million people. As a result the goal of cutting hunger and achieving a food-secure world poses an increasingly complex research agenda for the CGIAR and its partners.

Moreover, new evidence suggests that the task may be larger than previously thought. IFPRI is working on a new approach to measuring food insecurity that goes beyond the current methodology based on national food availability data. We draw, in addition, on nationally representative surveys that gather information directly at the household level—the level at which access to food actually takes place. Preliminary results from this work are available for 10 Sub-Saharan African countries. In 7 of those countries, the new method shows a significantly higher food-insecure population, whereas in the others, the results are about the same. So the situation may be even worse than estimates based on food availability suggest.

Furthermore, hunger has dimensions beyond insufficient calorie intake. Hidden hunger due to micronutrient deficiencies poses a huge global health problem. The scope is reasonably well known: hundreds of millions of iron-, vitamin A-, and iodine-deficient people in the developing world fail to reach their full potential and are confronted with impaired livelihoods, illness, and death. Women and children are particularly affected. Improving diet quality is also a major element in assisting people living with HIV/AIDS. But detailed monitoring information on progress in cutting this hidden hunger remains obscured by lack of data. The CGIAR Biofortification Challenge Program—HarvestPlus—looks beyond production quantities and will address this information gap as part of its action-oriented research agenda. Here, better information, more efficient food retail systems, and advanced agricultural sciences can all contribute to deep and sustained improvement.

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