Ending rural hunger

The Ending Rural Hunger project is a first attempt at providing a tool to review and follow-up on Sustainable Development Goal 2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Endingruralhunger.org is a toolkit to review and follow-up on this global goal by providing insight into each countries’ global efforts to end rural hunger. It was launched in October 2015 by the Brookings Institute, USA.

The Ending Rural Hunger report, published in October 2015, focuses on one core element of the new global goal for 2030: ending rural hunger. Of the 795 million people in the world who are undernourished, perhaps three-quarters of them live in developing countries’ rural areas. Unlike in urban areas, ending hunger in rural areas is primarily about promoting transformational change in local food and agricultural systems. It is about more than growing enough food. It is about demand for as well as supply of food; quality as well as quantity; an adequate diet today and assurance of one tomorrow. This aspect of food security requires a particular focus on the needs of small-scale farms, including the special challenges faced by women farmers. Today there are about 500 million small farms, and they provide livelihoods for up to 2.5 billion rural people. Much of the march to end hunger will be determined by what happens on these farms.

This report presents one element of a new set of tools aiming to help track and compare efforts of developing and developed country governments to end rural hunger. It contains the key results and actionable recommendations of a comprehensive effort to quantify the rural food and nutrition security (FNS) needs, policies, and resources in 116 developing countries, alongside an assessment of 29 developed countries’ domestic agricultural and biofuel policies plus FNS aid policies.