The 2019 “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” Report

July 15, 2019, New York: The 2019 “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” report released today underscores “the immense challenge” to achieving the Zero Hunger target of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) by 2030: After nearly a decade of progress, the number of people who suffer from hunger has slowly increased over the past three years, with about one in every nine people globally suffering from hunger today. 

As UN News states about the report, hunger is increasing in many countries where economic growth is lagging, particularly in middle-income countries and those that rely heavily on international primary commodity trade. Income inequality is rising in many of the countries where hunger is on the rise, making it even more difficult for the poor, vulnerable or marginalized to cope with economic slowdowns and downturns.

Hunger has risen almost 20 per cent in Africa’s subregions, areas which also have the greatest prevalence of undernourishment. The pervasiveness of hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean is still below seven per cent, it is slowly increasing. And in Asia, undernourishment affects 11 per cent of the population. Although southern Asia saw great progress over the last five years, at almost 15 per cent, it is still the subregion with the highest prevalence of undernourishment.

The heads of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the World Health Organization (WHO) jointly launched the report, and urged that “Our actions to tackle these troubling trends will have to be bolder, not only in scale but also in terms of multi-sectoral collaboration,”

HHO representative W. Stan Bian participated in the meeting.  

The Human Health Organization strives to supports the achievement of the Zero Hunger target of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. HHO also is a supporter of the “United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition, 2016-2025.” Declared by the United Nations General Assembly on April 1, 2016, the “United Nations Decade of Action on Nutrition, 2016-2025” is a common vision towards mobilizing actions to eradicate all forms of malnutrition in all countries.