Upcoming report presents people’s view of world hunger

To be published next week, the State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) report (led by FAO and other UN agencies) will most certainly confirm the trend observed since several years of increase in the figures of people globally affected by hunger and malnutrition. Estimated in 2019 at 820 million, with 2 billion in a state of food insecurity, without a doubt, these figures will be further inflated due to the current multifold crisis linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, plunging large parts of populations across regions in a state of food insecurity. 

The trends observed last year, of open attacks to human rights and regressive policies by authoritarian governments, for example in Brazil, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, were confirmed again in 2020. Driven by international financial institutions or trade agreements, an increase in neo-liberal policies reducing social and labor protections and dispossessing rural communities from their access to natural resources were witnessed in Ecuador, Honduras, Indonesia and Morocco. These structural trends observed will undeniably also contribute to the increasing numbers the SOFI report will present.    

As a part of its Peoples Monitoring Initiative, the Global Network on the Right to Food and Nutrition (GNRtFN) will release the State of the Right to Food and Nutrition Report on July 22. This report, rather than collecting masses of often corporate-supported statistical data, which ignores lived experiences, exposes the structural issues that cause hunger and malnutrition worldwide, which themselves are grounded in discrimination of all kinds.
The report also presents stories from ground, which illustrate deeper analyses on concrete cases of on-going struggles or achievements by people and communities claiming their right to food and nutrition or strengthening its protection at all levels.

“This year’s edition should not be understood as a counter-report to the SOFI report, but rather as complementary by providing a stronger human rights and food sovereignty analysis often left out,” says Daniel Fyfe, Monitoring Coordinator for FIAN International and the main facilitator for the report. 

NOTES TO EDITORS:

• The State of the Right to Food and Nutrition Report was first published in September 2019. This year’s edition will be released on July 22. 
•  Unreleased copies of the report are available upon request for interested media outlets.