en de

Policy Recommendations


 
 
   
Photo: Misper Apawu/Welthungerhilfe, Sierra Leone 2025; In Kenema District, Sierra Leone, villagers gather for their weekly village savings and loan meeting to make decisions on communal savings. Through this community support system, members can access microcredits for food or to invest in household needs. Hide

To be effective, policy strategies must be designed and implemented with a clear commitment to several foundational principles: the right of all people to adequate food, the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises, the need to integrate nutrition into broader policy sectors, and the pursuit of localization, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

While not every stand-alone recommendation that follows addresses each cross-cutting issue, these priorities are assumed to underpin all actions proposed. Our aim is to highlight catalytic, coherent actions through which all actors can address interconnected challenges in a meaningful and sustainable way.

  1. Leave No One Behind: Act Urgently on Hunger and Build Resilient Food Systems

    • Secure political leadership for sustainable food systems transformation. Governments at all levels must commit to building inclusive, resilient, sustainable, and peace-oriented food systems that address all forms of malnutrition and involve the full scope of those food systems, from production to disposal, and their social, economic, and environmental impacts. This approach includes legally recognizing the right to food, ensuring accountability, promoting food sovereignty, and ensuring the full participation of women and youth in governance and decision-making.

    • Promote sustainable, climate-resilient agricultural development as a long-term solution to food insecurity. This requires investing in food systems that adopt appropriate, innovative technologies, draw on local knowledge, secure land and water rights, and prioritize ecosystem restoration—with active collaboration between governments, civil society, academia, the private sector, and communities to build inclusive and sustainable value chains. Responsible political leadership is essential to ensure these efforts are protected and not undermined.

    • Ensure adequate, flexible, and accountable financing from diversified sources, including humanitarian, development, climate finance, domestic mobilization, and private sector sources. Donors must meet existing commitments, reverse assistance cuts, and prioritize the reduction of hunger across all major funding frameworks, including the upcoming European Union Multiannual Financial Framework. From now until 2030, all stakeholders must prioritize financing and operationalizing existing hunger and nutrition strategies, with clear timelines and accountability mechanisms.

  2. Strengthen National-Level Political Commitment and Prioritize Localized Implementation

    • Promote high-level ownership and institutionalize responsibility. Heads of state and governments must champion initiatives to eradicate hunger and designate specific offices or individuals to be accountable for overseeing hunger policy and reporting on progress. There is already a body of evidence and experience related to the role of high-level leadership and institutional accountability, drawn from the Scaling Up Nutrition Movement and the Committee on World Food Security, which promote clearly mandated, multisectoral coordination mechanisms at global and national level.

    • Establish inclusive accountability mechanisms. Policies and plans must be informed by those who depend on them and who will experience their outcomes—positive and negative. Joint planning and review platforms—spaces where government, civil society, and other stakeholders can assess progress, identify gaps, and agree on corrective actions—have proven to be effective. Stakeholders in this joint work must, however, value and rely on data as a foundation for accountability and action. Actions are thus needed to strengthen national and local capacities to collect, analyze, and communicate high-quality, disaggregated data.

    • Empower local governance. Local authorities should be equipped with dedicated budgets, tailored operational guidelines, and sustained capacity building on implementing context-specific solutions to hunger. Civil society organizations must be actively and meaningfully engaged as key partners in both elaborating and implementing development strategies.

  3. Break the Cycle of Conflict and Hunger

    • Prevent and mitigate the impact of conflict on hunger. Conflict remains the primary driver of global hunger. The impacts of conflict on food systems— lost livelihoods, protracted displacement, and destruction of land, food value chains, ecosystems, and communities—last for generations. Governments and humanitarian actors must prioritize and invest in risk-informed, proactive approaches that protect lives and livelihoods before conditions reach catastrophic levels. Stakeholders must engage communities to address the recurring drivers and consequences of conflict that undermine sustainable food security.

    • Uphold international law and hold perpetrators accountable for using hunger as a weapon of war. Hunger and starvation are being deliberately weaponized. Recognition of this fact is essential at the highest political levels. Ignoring its use, even in the face of evidence, normalizes it. United Nations member states and relevant intergovernmental bodies must ensure that such crimes are independently investigated and prosecuted and that UN Resolution 2417, condemning the starving of civilians as a method of war, is fully implemented.

Policy Recommendations Archive

GHI Policy Recommendations in Review

GHI Policy Recommendations in Review

To point the way toward overcoming hunger, GHI reports have long recommended policy actions backed by evidence. Now, after 20 years of tracking hunger through the GHI, it is useful to look back at past policy recommendations to see what enduring lessons can offer guidance going forward.

Policy Recommendations (2025)

Policy Recommendations (2025)

These recommendations highlight that climate, nutrition, and food systems policies should be guided by human rights obligations and international law, emphasizing the principles of equity and justice.

Policy Recommendations (2024)

Policy Recommendations (2024)

These recommendations highlight that climate, nutrition, and food systems policies should be guided by human rights obligations and international law, emphasizing the principles of equity and justice.

Policy Recommendations (2023)

Policy Recommendations (2023)

These recommendations highlight the interest of youth in shaping their future as well as their right to do so. Generational and gender justice must underpin equitable, sustainable, and resilient food systems that fulfill the right to adequate food for current and future generations.

Policy Recommendations (2022)

Policy Recommendations (2022)

These recommendations highlight the need to respond to current emergencies while also transforming food systems so they are more equitable, inclusive, sustainable, and resilient—and thus are able to avert future crises.

Policy Recommendations (2021)

Policy Recommendations (2021)

Integrating a peace-building lens into the creation of resilient food systems and a food security lens into peace building can help advance both sustainable food and nutrition security and durable peace.

Policy Recommendations (2020)

Policy Recommendations (2020)

To ensure the right to adequate and nutritious food for all and to end hunger by 2030, we must not only reshape our food systems to become fair, healthy, resilient, and environmentally friendly but also integrate them into a broader political effort to maximize the health of humans, animals, and our planet.