Food Security

In the 2016 Global Hunger Index (produced by IFPRI, Concern International, and ), Malawi ranked 88 th out of 118 countries, with 20.7 percent of the population suffering from undernourishment and 42.4 percent of children under 5 years of age suffering from stunting. In the lean season, food and nutrition security poses even more of a challenge; according to an assessment by the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee, 2016 lean-season food insecurity (stretching from October 2015 – March 2016) was forecast to affect around 2.8 million people.

By 2050, FAO estimates that the global population will have reached 9.1 billion people. To feed this population, the world will need to produce significantly more food: 3 billion more tons of cereal and over 200 million more tons of meat products per year. At the same time, however, we face a lack of arable land upon which farmers can expand their production, as well as increasing competition for natural resources and decreasing soil fertility.

FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) has recently released several new country briefs for the Africa South of the Sahara Food Security Portal’s prioritized countries. The country brief series provides information regarding countries’ current agricultural season and harvest prospects for main staple food crops, as well as estimates and forecasts of cereal production, cereal imports, and food prices and policy developments. This latest round of updates includes new information for Tanzania , Malawi , and Mozambique .

In 2011, agricultural ministers from the G-20 countries met in Paris to discuss how best to mitigate the adverse effects of price volatility following the food price shocks of 2007-08 and 2010-11.  One of the outcomes of the ministerial was the creation of the Agricultural Market information System (AMIS), which aims to provide better and more timely information on market supply and demand and thus to enable more informed policymaking.  Another outcome was the support of a pilot program to establish a regional humanitarian grain reserve in the ECOWAS countries of West Africa.&nbsp

According to FAO estimates, approximately 1.3 billion tonnes of food gets lost or wasted every year around the world. These losses occur all along the food value chain, from farm to fork, and understanding exactly where they occur for specific commodities and in specific geographic locations can go a long way in helping researchers and policymakers design interventions to reduce them. Such a reduction in food loss is an important part of the Sustainable Development Goals, specifically SDG12.