03 Nov FAO: The state of food security and nutrition in the world 2020
FAO’s latest ‘The State of The World’ report assesses progress towards achieving sustainable development goals of ensuring access to safe, nutritious food for all people all year round, and eradicating all forms of malnutrition.
Current estimates are that nearly 690 million people are malnourished. This has been on the rise since 2014, increasing by nearly 60 million in 5 years. The world is not on track to achieve zero hunger by 2030. While there are significant challenges in just accessing food, accessing healthy diets is even harder. Based on FAO’s estimations, a healthy diet is five times more expensive than diets that only meet dietary energy needs and is unaffordable for more than three billion people globally.
In order to increase availability and affordability of healthy diets, cost of nutritious foods must come down, requiring large transformations in food supply chains globally. This must begin with prioritising agricultural production towards more nutrition-sensitive food. This is supported by the DELTA Model®, which shows us that nutrient-dense foods must be prioritised to give the best chances of sufficient food production to meet global nutrient requirements.
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