Halving hunger by 2015

This paper commissioned by Millennium Project task force, reports on an initial assessment on the state of knowledge about under nutrition, and the proven and promising mechanisms to reduce it. The Millennium Project task force sought to integrate nutrition, agricultural, economic development, health care, and human rights perspectives on how best to reduce hunger and identify strategies likely to be most effective in different parts of the world with different population groups.

Highlights of the paper include:

• the millennium development goal (MDG) on hunger seeks to cut by half the number of undernourished people from 800 million to 400 million by 2015
• the main determinants of adequate nutrition are access to income to purchase food, adequate food supply, adequate sanitation, health and feeding practices, and social claims to food
• the percentage of hungry people is highest in east, central and southern Africa
• the hungry are increasingly concentrated in extensive areas of lower productivity, higher risk, and poor linkage to markets that have received inadequate investment in the past
• under nutrition has diverse causes at all points of the food chain, from a poor or deteriorating resource base, to food production constraints, high-cost distribution networks
• the largest number of food-insecure people in developing countries are farm households in high-risk environments for crop production
• while the urban poor presently account for about 160 million of the undernourished, rapid increases in those numbers are expected.

The report outlines a number of national actions to help meet the millennium hunger goal:

• expand ownership and control of natural assets to poor households and communities
• improve agricultural input and product markets and business linkages to benefit the poor
• directly enhance nutrition of the most hungry and vulnerable through community life-cycle nutrition programs
• improve famine prevention and response by expanding the use of best practices
• integrate hunger reduction strategies into national policies.

[adapted from author]