3 Billion People Cannot Afford Healthy Diet: Report

Rome: Countries need to make their agrifood systems more resilient to sudden shocks of the kind witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
 
This year’s The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report by FAO is entitled "Making agrifood systems more resilient to shocks and stresses." It provides an assessment of the ability of national agrifood systems to respond to or recover readily from shocks and stressors and offers guidance to governments on how they can improve resilience.
 
Today there are approximately 3 billion people who cannot afford a healthy diet. The SOFA 2021 report estimates that an additional 1 billion people would join their ranks if a shock reduced incomes by one-third. 

The report defines shocks as "short-term deviations from long-term trends that have substantial negative effects on a system, people’s state of well-being, assets, livelihoods, safety and ability to withstand future shocks." Examples include extreme weather events and surges in plant and animal diseases and pests.
 
Even before COVID-19 broke out, the world was not on track to meet its commitment to end hunger and malnutrition by 2030. And while food production and supply chains have historically been vulnerable to climate extremes, armed conflicts or increases in global food prices, the frequency and severity of such shocks is on the rise.
 
"The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted both the resilience and the weakness of our agrifood systems,” said FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu in a press release on Tuesday.
 
The world’s agrifood systems - the complex web of activities involved in the production of food and non-food agricultural products, as well as their storage, processing, transportation, distribution and consumption, produce 11 billion tonnes of food a year and employ billions of people, directly or indirectly. The urgency of strengthening their capacity to endure shocks cannot be stressed enough.
 
The report also presents country-level indicators of the resilience of agrifood systems in more than a hundred countries, by analysing factors such as transport networks, trade flows and the availability of healthy and varied diets. While low-income countries generally face much bigger challenges, its findings show that middle-income countries are also at risk. 
 
In Brazil, for example, 60 percent of the country’s export value comes from just one trading partner. Even high-income countries such as Australia and Canada are at risk from a shock because of the long distances involved in the distribution of food.
 
Based on the evidence of the report, FAO recommends that governments make resilience in agrifood systems a strategic part of their responses to ongoing and future challenges. The key here is diversification - of input sources, production, markets and supply chains, as well as of actors – since diversity creates multiple pathways for absorbing shocks. 
 
Another key factor is connectivity. Well-connected agrifood networks overcome disruptions faster by shifting sources of supply and channels for transport, marketing, inputs and labour. Finally, enhancing the resilience capacities of vulnerable households is critical to ensure a world free from hunger. 
 
"The SOFA report reflects FAO’s efforts aimed at increasing resilience and sets out new indicators to help Members measure the resilience capacity of their agrifood systems and identify gaps for improvement," Qu said.
 
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