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Examines what advocates of free trade in agriculture promised developing countries, what actually transpired, & what an alternative framework might look like. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWhen the G20 took up food security in 2010, many were optimistic that it could bring about positive change by addressing structural problems in commodity markets that were contributing to high and volatile food prices and exacerbating hunger. Its members could tighten the regulation of agricultural commodity futures markets, support multilateral trade rules that would better reflect both importer and exporter needs, end renewable fuel targets that diverted land to biofuels production, and coordinate food reserves. In this article, we argue that although the G20 took on food security as a focus area, it missed an important opportunity and has shown that it is not the most appropriate forum for food security policy. Instead of tackling the structural economic dimensions of food security, the G20 chose to promote smoothing and coping measures within the current global economic framework. By shifting the focus away from structural issues, the G20 has had a chilling effect on policy debates in other global food security forums, especially theUNCommittee on World Food Security (CFS). In addition, the G20 excludes the voices of the least developed countries and civil society, and lacks the expertise and capacity to implement its recommendations.

This briefing note offers an overview of the trends in official financial disbursements to agriculture for the period 2002–2018.1 It offers an illustrative analysis of the types of exploration into public funding for development that can be conducted using a database maintained by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1 All records of ODA extracted from the OECD CRS database (OECD, n.d.a). This analysis begins in 2002 because data relating to CRS disbursements prior to 2002 is not included in the database results table as the annual coverage is below 60% (OECD, n.d.e). Ending Hunger Sustainably: Trends in official development assistance (ODA) spending for agriculture2 (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC). Official development assistance (ODA) refers to resource flows, mostly monetary, that governments make available to other governments, generally coming from industrialized countries and given to developing countries. An understanding of recent trends in ODA spending, including the amounts involved, the recipients, and focus of the projects financed, puts into perspective the recommendations from the Ceres2030 project on how much—and how—to spend public funding for agriculture. ; IISD, IFPRI

In this brief, we focus on the effects of COVID-19 on hunger in sub-Saharan Africa, the region where undernourishment is most prevalent in the world and where the rates of increase are also greatest (FAO et al., 2020). Hunger tends to be concentrated in rural populations, whose livelihoods, incomes, and food security depend heavily on agriculture. In 2014, in the Malabo Declaration, African governments committed to ending hunger on the continent by 2025 through agriculture-led growth, integrating social protection programs and increasing agricultural productivity. The integration of social protection is critical to realizing this ambition, as economic growth alone will not eliminate deep-rooted inequalities and extreme poverty. The evidence shows that the greater the inequality in asset distribution (such as land, water, capital, finance, education, and health), the less likely it is for poor households to benefit from economic growth (FAO et al., 2019). People living in poverty face many constraints that prevent their taking advantage of the opportunities created by economic growth; social protection policies or programs designed to reduce poverty and vulnerability can help. Despite its importance, however, social protection coverage remains limited in sub-Saharan Africa, where, on average, fewer than 20% of households have access to some form of social protection, compared to 70% of households in Europe and Central Asia (World Bank, 2016).

The UN 2030 Agenda commits governments to evidence-based decision-making (UN General Assembly, 2015). This approach requires efforts to find and catalogue the evidence, then developing methods to analyze and synthesize it. It also means understanding the feasibility of whichever interventions the government identifies, taking into account the policy landscape in which the decision-maker operates. Policy interventions require political support among competing interests in the context of meeting both short- and long-term objectives. Motivated by the need to support tools for evidence-based policy-making, three partner organizations—Cornell University, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD)—formed a three-year partnership in 2018 called Ceres2030:Sustainable Solutions to End Hunger. The project is designed to support global development donors to increase the amount and improve the efcacy of their investment of public funds in improving food security and sustainability outcomes ; The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation, Germany

COVID-19 and the measures governments have put in place to prevent its aggravation have triggered an economic recession that will increase poverty rates and hunger. In June, the International Monetary Fund projected a 4.9% decline in global economic growth compared to 20191. A similar forecast has been generated under Ceres2030, a research project co-directed by the International Food Policy Research Institute, Cornell University and the International Institute for Sustainable Development that is calculating the cost of effective interventions to end hunger sustainably. The estimate is that 95 million additional people, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, will be living in extreme poverty by the end of the year. ; IFPRI3; 1 Fostering Climate-Resilient and Sustainable Food Supply; CRP2; Ceres2030 ; AFR; PIM ; Non-PR ; CGIAR Research Programs on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM)