Progress is being made to alleviate hunger in the global South. But UN FAO reports that, world food insecurity has not improved in the last five years

Our news team reports. The Millennium Development Goal to halve undernourishment in the global South between 2000 and 2015 is still possibly achievable, states a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of Food Insecurity in the World. But since 2007, progress has been thwarted by food price rises and fluctuations, increased inequity including less access to affordable food, disturbances including wars, and extreme climate conditions.

Another new report, Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices, from Oxfam, is less optimistic. It states that successive droughts and floods caused by human-caused climate change are likely to lead to incessant shortages of staple foods and price rises far higher than general inflation. This will cause hardship in higher-income countries, and waves of undernutrition and hunger in lower-income countries.

Tim Gore of Oxfam is quoted as saying: 'The huge potential impact of extreme weather events on future food prices is missing from today's climate change debate. The world needs to wake up to the drastic consequences facing our food system of climate inaction'. He added that the current extreme weather in the US and consequent crop failures, indicates what will happen on a global scale as the world warms.

The UN Food and Agriculture report is more measured, and its own summary shows that FAO is indeed becoming ever more a champion within the UN system of small farmers and rural communities. Some of the points FAO makes are:

• Around 850 million people in the global South are chronically undernourished and vulnerable to hunger.
• Allowing for rises in population, progress is being made, but not much since the finance and food price shocks that began in 2007.
• Impoverished communities must be able to participate in all processes meant to lift them out of food insecurity.
• Additional income from any source needs to be used to improve diets, and also provide for the future with improved basic health services.
• Governments must use any additional resources on public goods and services for the sake of impoverished communities.
• Agricultural growth involving smallholders, especially women, will be most effective in reducing extreme poverty and hunger when it increases returns to labour and generates employment for the poor.
• Economic growth needs to enable impoverished communities to diversify their diets, and to improve their access to safe drinking water and sanitation and to health services.
• Adequate nutrition is essential to sustainable economic growth.
• Social protection accelerates hunger reduction. It also can enable rapid economic growth through supporting impoverished communities.
• Enabling environments include equitable access to resources by the poor, empowerment of women, and design and use of social protection systems.
• Governance based on transparency, participation, accountability, the rule of law and human rights, is essential for all such policies and programmes.

Another Oxfam report, Food price rises doomed to repeat, was again pessimistic, pointing to factors including commodity speculation that create wild fluctuations in supplies and process of staple foods. A story carried in The Independent at the time of publication of this report gives one example of the current and potential future impacts of the practices of commodity traders: see Box 1.