Analysis | UNGA: Reimagining food systems

Seven things world leaders should consider to address global hunger

The United Nations building in New York (Image: Tomas Eidsvold/Unsplash)

With the 76th United Nations General Assembly in full swing in New York, food security is one of the key issues under the spotlight. In addition to the parade of speeches by world leaders, the U.S.-led summit on COVID-19 on Wednesday will be followed on Thursday by the United Nations Food Systems Summit, the first global summit of its kind in 25 years.

A new report published by the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD), and an event the Institute held on September 14 in collaboration with the Stimson Center, made several recommendations for world leaders, NGOs, and the private sector. Going into Thursday’s summit, attendees should focus on the need to break the link between hunger, instability, and conflict and on building political will for systemic change across the food system as the world recovers from the pandemic.

Here are seven key takeaways from the panel discussion and the report for world leaders to consider as they begin the summit:

1. Close to 1 billion people are malnourished, and the number of those who are food insecure or malnourished due to droughts, extreme weather events, and the pandemic is rising. According to the UN, the number of people who succumbed to food insecurity in 2020 rose by at least 318 million, primarily due to the pandemic. These trends are heading in the wrong direction and will require concerted international action to address them, the World Food Program USA’s Chase Sova said in last week’s panel.
2. The conflicts in Afghanistan and in the Ethiopian region of Tigray are the two most pressing hunger crises, requiring immediate multilateral attention and action. This week’s summit should focus leaders’ mind on these unfolding crises, both of which highlight the link between food insecurity and active conflict, exacerbated by environmental conditions. As panel moderator Johanna Mendelson Forman noted, food is a first order tool for stabilization in conflict zones — which the U.S. military calls the “golden hour” in stabilization operations — providing essential needs to get people strong enough to focus on other issues.
3. Food access and global stability go hand-in-hand; climate change, COVID-19, and conflict (the “three Cs”) have their greatest impact on food supply and food prices in the world’s most vulnerable regions. Fragile and conflict-affected states account for the vast majority of food insecure countries. Since the advent of COVID-19, they have faced halts in agricultural investments, making accessibility to water and resources for food production all the more difficult.
4. Climate change and environmental degradation also directly drive food insecurity. Unpredictable extreme weather events and natural disasters, such as floods and droughts in Brazil, massive swarms of locusts in Yemen, and well-documented heat waves in Latin America disrupt local food systems in vulnerable economies. The effects of climate change are made worse in many places by soil degradation and deforestation, as Rod Schoonover from the Council on Strategic Risks noted.
5. The private sector must also play a managed role in the transformation of food systems, argued panelist Devry Boughner Vorwerk. Food security does not just mean consuming more calories, but consuming the right calories, in the form of a balanced, nutritious diet. The pandemic has brought more stakeholders into policy debates around food systems, Boughner Vorwerk argued, and it would serve governments well to ensure more usage and access to agricultural technologies, so that higher-quality food is both distributed and accessible
6. We must build food systems that respond to supply chain shocks, such as those caused by the pandemic and conflict. Efforts to mitigate COVID-19’s effects on the global economy, through lockdowns and other public health measures, have shed a light on fragility in labor-intensive supply chain systems with prices fluctuating at an alarming rate.
7. The international community already has existing frameworks to tackle these problems. U.N. Security Council Resolution 2417, adopted in 2018, allows for outside intervention in cases of starvation arising from conflict. All panelists agreed that a new international body is not politically feasible at the moment, nor is a global new body the only way to tackle food insecurity. Rather, the international community must make use of existing frameworks and empower existing institutions to be more effective.

World leaders should consider food security as a core component of their national security agenda. However, as Plataforma CIPO’s Adriana Abdenur noted, a securitized lens risks encouraging rent-seeking behavior by governments over resources. The national security framing, favored by Schoonover and others, may be particularly useful for the Biden administration, as it seeks to elevate climate as the existential national security threat, in line with the U.N. secretary-general’s focus on the importance of food security, malnutrition, and hunger. “To that end,” President Biden argued in his address to the General Assembly on Tuesday, “the United States is making a $10 billion commitment to end hunger and invest in food systems at home and abroad.”

In an ideal world, as ISD’s report outlines, leaders should view access to nutritious food not merely as a national security imperative, but as a basic human right. This will require a wholesale reframing of food security, and a focus on hunger, the devastating result of food insecurity. Ultimately, the Summit must guide policymakers to consider hunger through the lens of human rights and social safety nets, in order to achieve the United Nations goal of “zero hunger.”

Johanna Mendelson Forman, Eleanor Shiori Hughes, and Alistair Somerville contributed to this report.

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