The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014 - Strengthening the enabling environment to improve food security and nutrition

Editor's Notes

1. As last year, SOFI 2014 was jointly prepared by FAO, IFAD and WFP. Overall, the 2014 report is organized in three parts. The first part reviews undernourishment around the world. This is the main monitoring exercise, based on the estimation of the Prevalence of Undernourishment from 1990-92 up to 2012-14 (last period based on projections). This part reviews progress of countries and regions towards the 1996 WFS goal and the MDG 1 hunger target. The second part of the 2014 report uses the Suite of Indicators to monitor the different dimensions of food security. Indicators of the four dimensions, measured on a scale from 1 to 5, have been aggregated into composite indices for each dimension for the years 1994–96 and 2012–14 using weights derived from principal components analysis. The third part of the report brings the discussion at country level.
2. The latest FAO estimates indicate that global hunger reduction continues: about 805 million people are estimated to be chronically undernourished in 2012–14, down more than 100 million over the last decade, and 209 million lower than in 1990–92. In the same period, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 to 11.3 percent globally and from 23.4 to 13.5 percent for the developing countries.
3. There are two established targets against which progress in reducing hunger is assessed. One is the 1996 World Food Summit (WFS) goal, which is to halve the number of hungry people; the other is the 2001 Millennium Development Goal (MDG) hunger target, which is to halve the proportion of hungry people in the total population. Both targets have 1990 as the starting year and 2015 as the target year. The decline in the share of hungry people has been more impressive than the reduction in absolute numbers. Between 1990–92 and 2012–14, the prevalence of undernourishment has fallen from 18.7 percent to 11.3 percent at the global level, and from 23.4 percent to 13.5 percent in developing countries. This means that the MDG 1c hunger target of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 is within reach. If the current trend of a reduction of about 0.5 percent per year since 1990–92 continues, the prevalence of undernourishment in developing regions would reach 12.8 percent in 2015 – 1.1 percentage points above the MDG target of 11.7 percent. With greater efforts, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern and Western Asia, the trend in hunger reduction can be accelerated to meet the MDG hunger target. There is not enough time to achieve the World Food Summit (WFS) target of halving the number of undernourished people by 2015. This would require reducing the number of undernourished persons by roughly 300 million in one year.
4. Despite overall progress, marked differences across regions persist. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of undernourishment, with only modest progress in recent years. Around one in four people in the region remains undernourished. The situation is different in Northern Africa, which has a far lower hunger burden, with the prevalence of undernourishment consistently less than 5 percent since 1990. Asia, the most populous region in the world, still has the highest number of undernourished. Asia as a whole has a prevalence of undernourishment of 12.7 percent. Overall, it is close to reaching the MDG 1c hunger target, but there are large differences across its subregions. Eastern and South-Eastern Asia have already met the target, having cut their undernutrition rates by more than half and more than two-thirds respectively. The Caucasus and Central Asia are also on track to reach the goal by 2015, while lack of progress in Southern and Western Asia makes it unlikely that these regions can achieve MDG 1c. Southern Asia has made slow progress in hunger reduction. Although the prevalence of undernourishment has declined from 24.0 percent in 1990–92 to 15.8 percent in 2012–14, progress is still too slow to allow Southern Asia to reach the MDG target by 2015. The situation is worse in Western Asia, where the prevalence of undernourishment actually increased from 6.3 percent in 1990–92 to 8.7 percent in 2012–14, largely owing to political instability and the deterioration in overall economic conditions during recent years. Latin America and the Caribbean has the most successful developing region record in increasing food security. It has already met the MDG target by a comfortable margin and is close to the WFS summit target.
5. While at the global level there has been an overall reduction in the number of undernourished between 1990–92 and 2012–14, different rates of progress across regions have led to changes in the distribution of undernourished people in the world. Most of the world’s undernourished people are still to be found in Southern Asia, followed by Eastern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In Asia there are overall 526 million people undernourished as opposed to 742 in 1990. However, the share of Eastern and South-Eastern Asia in the total number has decreased markedly from the baseline period. The share of Sub Saharan Africa, instead, has increased considerably.
6. The WFS of 1996 established four dimensions of food security: availability, access, stability and utilization. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013 introduced a suite of indicators organized around these four dimensions with a view to overcoming the drawbacks that arise from relying solely on the prevalence of undernourishment indicator. By measuring food security across its four dimensions, the suite of indicators provides a more comprehensive picture, and can also help in targeting and prioritizing food security and nutrition policies. The availability dimension captures not only the quantity, but also the quality and diversity of food. Indicators for assessing availability include the adequacy of dietary energy supply; the share of calories derived from cereals, roots and tubers; the average protein supply; the average supply of animal-source proteins; and the average value of food production. The access dimension comprises indicators of physical access and infrastructure such as railway and road density; economic access, represented by the domestic food price index; and the prevalence of undernourishment. The stability dimension is divided into two groups. The first group covers factors that measure exposure to food security risk with a diverse set of indicators such as the cereal dependency ratio, the area under irrigation, and the value of staple food imports as a percentage of total merchandise exports. The second group focuses on the incidence of shocks such as domestic food price volatility, fluctuations in domestic food supply, and political instability. The utilization dimension also falls into two groups. The first encompasses variables that determine the ability to utilize food, notably indicators of access to water and sanitation. The second group focuses on outcomes of poor food utilization, i.e. nutritional failures of children under five years of age, such as wasting, stunting and underweight. Since the 2013 edition of this report, four more utilization indicators of micronutrient deficiency have been added: the prevalence of anaemia and of vitamin A deficiency among children under five; and the prevalence of iodine deficiency and of anaemia in pregnant women.