resulted in a trade deal, but India blocked it out of concern that WTO limits on agricultural subsidies and food grain reserves would hamper its food secu- rity program. In November 2014 the United States and India reached a breakthrough to move the deal forward. Te United States agreed not to challenge India’s food security program until the dispute was formally resolved in the WTO. Finally, thanks to an increasing understanding
of the importance of nutrition and tireless work by nutrition advocates to increase atention to the issue, nutrition shot up to the top of the global develop- ment agenda in 2014. It has become clear that the factors that influence people’s nutrition go well beyond food and agriculture to include drinking water and sanitation, the role of women, the qual- ity of caregiving, and others. Malnutrition is now understood to include not just hunger and micronu-
It has become clear that the factors that influence people’s nutrition go well beyond food and agriculture to include drinking water and sanitation, the role of women, the quality of caregiving, and others.
trient malnutrition but also overnutrition that man- ifests itself in overweight and obesity—conditions that pose increasing challenges not just in rich coun- tries, but also in developing countries. In a sign of the current high interest in nutri-
tion, more than 2,200 people gathered at the Second International Conference on Nutrition (ICN2) in Rome in November—22 years aſter the first such conference. At the conference, government represen- tatives and high-level officials endorsed 60 far-reach- ing actions designed to help combat all forms of malnutrition. Following the event, FAO created the Action for Nutrition Trust Fund to mobilize funds for nutrition interventions and help countries set up mechanisms to monitor their progress toward the
6 STRONG ADVANCES AND STUBBORN SETBACKS
ICN2 nutrition targets. In addition, membership in the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, which brings together countries seeking to improve nutri- tion and share experiences, had climbed to 54 coun- tries by the end of 2014.
CRISES AND CHRONIC VULNERABILITY WERE SEVERE IN MANY HOT SPOTS
National, regional, and global food systems are still subject to a wide variety of shocks, and 2014 pro- vided ample evidence of this vulnerability. Te civil war in Syria, now in its fourth year of
conflict, has sent shock waves through the region. Syria’s economy contracted by more than 40 percent in 2011–2013,14 and an estimated 4.9 million peo- ple are now in moderate need of food assistance.15 Syria’s neighbors are affected too. As of December 2014, Lebanon and Turkey each hosted more than 1 million Syrian refugees, and Jordan was home to more than 600,000. Because of a funding crisis, the World Food Programme (WFP) was briefly forced to halt assistance to Syrian refugees in neighbor- ing countries in late 2014. An emergency appeal restored assistance, but funding remains a constant concern. In January 2015, Lebanon announced new visa requirements for Syrians. Although one cannot dismiss the historical, socioeconomic, and political factors associated with this conflict, it also appears that Syria’s civil war stems partly from the govern- ment’s failure to respond adequately to widespread droughts in 2006–2010 that destroyed the live- lihoods of 50 percent of farmers and herders and pushed up bread prices (see Chapter 7). Elsewhere in the region, conflict also plagued Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, with serious implications for food security. In West Africa, a food crisis emerged from a dif-
ferent kind of shock: the largest-ever outbreak of Ebola, which likely began with the consumption of bat meat (see Chapter 6). In 2014, the virus infected more than 20,000 people, of whom more than 8,000 died, mainly in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Besides destroying lives, the epidemic wreaked havoc on food systems, disrupting agricultural pro- duction, harvesting, transport, and markets and contributing to a rise in food prices. Price increases of up to 30 percent for rice and up to 150 percent for
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