Last year, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World marked the start of a new era in monitoring progress towards achieving a world without hunger and malnutrition in all its forms – an aim set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2030 Agenda). Addressing the challenges of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all its forms features prominently in the second Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda: Ensuring access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food for all (Target 2.1) and eliminating all forms of malnutrition (Target 2.2).
It is also understood that attainment of SDG2 depends largely on – and also contributes to – the achievement of the other goals of the 2030 Agenda: ending poverty; improving health, education, gender equality and access to clean water and sanitation; decent work; reduced inequality; and peace and justice, to name only a few. This transformational vision embedded in the 2030 Agenda provides an imperative for new ways of thinking, acting and measuring. For example, the growing global epidemic of obesity, which is increasingly affecting lower income countries and rapidly adding to the multiple burden of malnutrition and non-communicable diseases, also points to the need to re-examine how we think about and measure hunger and food insecurity as well as their linkages with nutrition and health. Fortunately, data gathering and measurement tools are rapidly evolving to meet the monitoring challenges presented by the new agenda.
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