Issues in Focus
In addition to the country scores, the Global Hunger Index report every year focuses on a primary issue or theme. An expert in the relevant field authors an essay on this issue, addressing causes, presenting plans, and recommending actions.
In this essay, we unravel the nexus of gender justice, climate resilience, and food and nutrition security to identify the strategies, both immediate and structural, that can contribute to a gender-just, climate-resilient, and food-secure world.
Young people are emerging into adulthood in a context of unequal and unsustainable food systems that fail to deliver food and nutrition security and are highly vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation.
Spiraling food prices and global supply chain disruptions precipitated by the Ukraine war, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, and regional conflicts have worsened hunger for millions of people.
Failing food systems and the consequent increase in hunger are among the most pressing issues of our time. The world is falling far short of what is needed to achieve Zero Hunger—the second of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
2020. It’s been a year that none of us could have predicted. Yet in many ways it is a culmination of the predictions we have heard for decades.
Human actions have created a world in which it is becoming ever more difficult to adequately and sustainably feed and nourish the human population. For the world’s hungry and undernourished people, climate change is a threat multiplier.
Across the globe, people are being forcibly displaced from their homes on a massive scale. Most people are displaced not as the result of just one factor, but because of a combination of factors, with hunger often figuring prominently in their experience.
Typically, groups with the least social, economic, or political power suffer hunger or malnutrition — whether they are barely eking out a living in remote rural areas of poor countries or residing in marginalized communities in wealthy cities.
As a young doctor beginning my career in Nepal, India, and Bangladesh, I saw first-hand the crushing effects of hunger and malnutrition on the lives of the poorest and most vulnerable. It became clear that people do not live in compartments, but rather...
War and famine, two fearsome horsemen, have long ridden side by side. Armed conflict disrupts food systems, destroys livelihoods, displaces people, and leaves those who do not flee both terrified and unsure when they will eat their next meal.
Hidden hunger, also known as micronutrient deficiencies, afflicts more than 2 billion individuals, or one in three people, globally. Its effects can be devastating, leading to mental impairment, poor health, low productivity, and even death.
Even temporary shocks and stressors can have long-term consequences. A poor harvest that reduces a child’s food intake, even temporarily, can have serious effects on her longer-term cognitive and physical development and therefore future earning capacity.
In the pursuit of agricultural and economic growth, natural resource scarcity and degradation have generally been afterthoughts. We need a new socioeconomic model that is sustainable and that prioritizes poor and marginalized people.
Agricultural markets and food prices are no longer stable and predictable, if they ever were. After decades of gradually falling food prices, the world is experiencing a period of spikes and rapid swings in food prices...
In order to improve their GHI scores, countries need to accelerate progress in reducing child underweight by improving childhood nutrition.
Because developing countries are more integrated within world markets through trade, investment flows, and remittances than in the past, the latest food and financial crises have stronger effects on those countries than during previous crises.