Chapter 1 FOOD POLICY IN 2014–2015
Strong Advances and Stubborn Setbacks
Shenggen Fan
SUMMARY Te year 2014 saw mixed results for food and nutrition security: some countries made headway on policies to cut hunger, while in other countries conflict and health crises took a heavy human toll. Much of the year’s discourse focused on potential priorities for the future global development agenda.
F
or those of us working to ensure sustainable solutions to hunger and poverty, 2014 was a year of progress, vulnerabilities, and hope.
In many ways, human well-being continued to improve in 2014. Te share of
the world’s people who are hungry and poor kept falling. Te Millennium Devel- opment Goal (MDG) of halving global poverty has been achieved: the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by 700 million between 1990 and 2010— five years ahead of the 2015 target date.1 Te goal of cuting the share of hungry people by half seems nearly atainable, having been met by 64 developing coun- tries since 1990. Global undernourishment has fallen drastically during the past two decades, from 19 percent to 11 percent.2 Yet events also reminded us of our serious and continued vulnerability to
shocks, both natural and human caused, and other risks, including the Ebola epi- demic, droughts and floods, conflicts, and the ticking time bomb of overweight and obesity. We have oſten not found effective ways of preventing, responding to, and overcoming risks and shocks that cross national borders and that do not fit neatly into the scope of existing institutions. To cope not only with the existing challenges of poverty and hunger but also
with additional challenges that are sure to come, policymakers from countries rich and poor, as well as development agencies and other actors, must recognize the need to bolster our systems and institutions. Te global dialogue on how to meet these challenges continued on many fronts in 2014, and important global and national commitments were made on nutrition, trade, and climate. In a year of extensive activity related to nutrition, another hopeful sign was the increased recognition of the severity of not only micronutrient malnutrition (or “hidden hunger”) but also overweight and obesity, as well as a greater understanding of
Shenggen Fan is director general, International Food Policy Research Institute, Washington, DC.
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