This brief examines estimates produced by several recent model simulations and frameworks that focus on the cost of ending hunger as well as progress toward other development goals—estimates that range from US$7 billion to US$265 billion per year. The differences among these estimates are largely attributable to the different targeted objectives and policy questions of each modeling exercise, different investment strategies considered, and varying assumptions about the role of different sectors in reducing hunger.
This book is a historical review of international food and agriculture since the founding of the international organizations following the Second World War, including the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and into the 1970s, when CGIAR was established and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) was created to recycle petrodollars. Despite numerous international consultations and an increased number of actors, there has been no real growth in international assistance, except for the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The book concurrently focuses on the structural transformation of developing countries in Asia and Africa, with some making great strides in small farmer development and in achieving structural transformation of their economies. Some have also achieved Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG2, but most have not. Not only are some countries, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, lagging behind, but they face new challenges of climate change, competition from emerging countries, population pressure, urbanization, environmental decay, and dietary transition. Lagging developing countries need huge investments in human capital, and physical and institutional infrastructure, to take advantage of rapid change in technologies, but the role of international assistance in financial transfers has diminished. The COVID-19 pandemic has not only set many poorer countries back but starkly revealed the weaknesses of past strategies. Transformative changes are needed in developing countries with international cooperation to achieve better outcomes. Will change in the United States bring new opportunities for multilateral cooperation?"--
This Open Access book compiles the findings of the Scientific Group of the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021 and its research partners. The Scientific Group was an independent group of 28 food systems scientists from all over the world with a mandate from the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations. The chapters provide science- and research-based, state-of-the-art, solution-oriented knowledge and evidence to inform the transformation of contemporary food systems in order to achieve more sustainable, equitable and resilient systems.
At the heart of the 2030 Agenda was a promise to prioritize two objectives: to eradicate poverty and end hunger and malnutrition in all their forms. While global hunger, measured by the prevalence of undernourishment, had been on the decline, the absolute number of hungry people remained very high. In response, heads of states at the G7 Summit in Elmau in 2015 committed to lift 500 million people out of hunger and malnutrition by 2030 as part of a broader effort undertaken with partner countries to support the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, i.e. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 2) to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030. Nevertheless, the number of undernourished people in the world kept rising, from 653 million people in 2015 to 690 million people in 2019, highlighting the challenge of achieving the goal of Zero Hunger and malnutrition by 2030. This study reviews the food security situation and change therein in light of recent developments, including COVID-19. It also analyses to which extent G7 countries responded to the challenge and their commitment in terms of development assistance and outlines promising investment opportunities to meet the 2030 targets.
This report assesses the cost of adaptation to climate change across a range of future climate scenarios and investment options. We focus on offsetting climate change impacts on hunger through investment in agricultural research, water management, and rural infrastructure in developing countries. We link climate, crop, water, and economic models to (1) analyze scenarios of future change in the agriculture sector to 2050 and (2) assess trade-offs for these investments across key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for poverty, hunger, and water. Our reference projections show that climate change slows progress toward eliminating hunger, with an additional 78 million people facing chronic hunger in 2050 relative to a no-climate-change future, over half of them in Africa south of the Sahara. Increased investments can offset these impacts. Achieving this would require that annual investment in international agricultural research increase from US$1.62 billion to US$2.77 billion per year between 2015 and 2050. Additional water and infrastructure investments are estimated to be more expensive than agricultural R&D at about US$12.7 billion and US$10.8 billion per year, respectively, but these address key gaps to support transformation toward food system resiliency. Findings on ranges of costs and trade-offs and complementarities across SDGs will help policymakers make better-informed choices between alternative investment strategies.
Food Ethics: The Basics is a concise yet comprehensive introduction to the ethical dimensions of the production and consumption of food. It offers an impartial exploration of the most prominent ethical questions relating to food and agriculture, including: Should we eat animals? Are locally produced foods ethically superior to globally sourced foods? Do people in affluent nations have a responsibility to help reduce global hunger? Should we embrace bioengineered foods? What should be the role of government in promoting food safety and public health? This second edition has been revised and updated throughout, not only to take in the latest empirical and policy information, but also to address the impact of major issues such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, AI and machine learning, and the rapid growth of the "gig economy." Using extensive data and real-world examples, as well as providing suggestions for further reading, Food Ethics: The Basics is an ideal introduction for anyone interested in the ethics of food.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators analyzes the impact of new international tax regulations on the scope and scale of tax evasion, tax avoidance, and money laundering. These are analyzed through an ecosystem framework in which, similar to a natural ecosystem, new tax regulations appear as heavy shocks to the tax ecosystem, to which the 'species' such as countries, corporations, and tax experts will react by looking for new loopholes and niches of survival. By analyzing the impact of tax reforms from different perspectives--a legal, political science, accounting, and economic one--one may derive an assessment of the reforms and policy recommendations for an improved international tax system. The ultimate goal is to combat fiscal fraud and empower regulators, in that line, this volume is intended for a broad audience that seeks to know more about the latest state of the art in the realm of taxation from a multidisciplinary perspective. The money involved amounts to billions in unpaid taxes that could be better used for stopping hunger, guaranteeing education, and safeguarding biodiversity, hence making this world a better one. Regulators can see this book as a guiding light of what has happened in the past forty years, and how the world has and will continue to change as a result of it. Combating Fiscal Fraud and Empowering Regulators is also a warning about new emerging tax loopholes, such as freeports or golden passports and visas, where residency can be bought in tax havens, even within the European Union. The main message is that inequality can and has to be reduced substantially and that this can be achieved through a well-working international tax system that eliminates secrecy, opaqueness, and tax havens.
Agrifood systems generate significant benefits to society, including the food that nourishes us and jobs and livelihoods for over a billion people. However, their negative impacts due to unsustainable business-as-usual activities and practices are contributing to climate change, natural resource degradation and the unaffordability of healthy diets. Addressing these negative impacts is challenging, because people, businesses, governments and other stakeholders lack a complete picture of how their activities affect economic, social and environmental sustainability when they make decisions on a day-to-day basis. The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 looks into the true cost of food for sustainable agrifood systems. The report introduces the concept of hidden environmental, health and social costs and benefits of agrifood systems and proposes an approach – true cost accounting (TCA) – to assess them. To operationalize the TCA approach, the report proposes a two-phase assessment process, first relying on national-level TCA assessments to raise awareness and then moving towards in-depth and targeted evaluations to prioritize solutions and guide transformative actions. It provides a first attempt at national-level assessments for 154 countries, suggesting that global hidden costs from agrifood systems amount to at least to 10 trillion 2020 PPP dollars. The estimates indicate that low-income countries bear the highest burden of the hidden costs of agrifood systems relative to national income. Despite the preliminary nature of these estimates, the analysis reveals the urgent need to factor hidden costs into decision-making for the transformation of agrifood systems. Innovations in research and data, alongside investments in data collection and capacity building, are needed to scale the application of TCA, especially in low- and middle-income countries, so that it can become a viable tool to inform decision- and policymaking in a transparent and consistent way.
