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Enhancing Food Security and Nutrition Policy Assistance: Lessons from Experience

Year of publication 2009

Pages 83

Author Agriculture and Economic Development Analysis Division

Product type Book (stand-alone)

Edition 1

Synopsis (short abstract) Precious time has elapsed since the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) in which world leaders agreed that hunger reduction required a specific approach simultaneously ensuring that sufficient food is available, that people have the resources to access nutritious food, that they are in sufficiently good health to be able to absorb this food and that the stability throughout time of each of these dimensions is ensured. Yet, notwithstanding some isolated regional and national-level successes, hun ger has increased and a dire lack of a comprehensive approach to hunger reduction is still witnessed. Even before the onslaught of volatile prices and the financial and economic crisis, progress in reducing hunger was insufficient. Worldwide, 1 020 million people are estimated to be undernourished in 2009 which represents an increase of 203 million hungry people compared with 1990–92, which is the WFS and Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) baseline period. Food security is still lar gely misconceived as exclusively a matter of increased food production. As a result, comprehensive strategic approaches to hunger reduction have been insufficient. With this in mind, in 2004, through the FAO Netherlands Partnership Programme (FNPP), FAO began assisting several countries, namely Bhutan, Cambodia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zanzibar in integrating a specific and comprehensive food security and nutrition focus into their poverty reduction strategies or other national developme nt frameworks. Through the fruitful collaboration between FAO and counterpart governments under the FNPP, each of the above-mentioned countries is now including food security and nutrition into major national policy and planning processes. This publication is also a contribution to the ongoing reflection within FAO on ways to improve the delivery of FAO policy assistance to member countries. In this regard, it demonstrates the potential value added of multidisciplinary collaboration in the area of policy assistance and helped to generate new options to be considered within the context of FAO reform.

Language English

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