Executive Summary
The findings from this report show that the agricultural development community can end hunger differently. It shows how this can be done through investment in ten high-impact nutrition sensitive interventions in agrifood systems that improve food security and dietary outcomes without continued harm to the planet.
Aid has played a critical role in decreasing hunger in the world from 13 percent, or 825 million people in 2002, to 8.2 percent, or 673 million people in 2024. In the same period, official development assistance (ODA) to agriculture and food security doubled, going from US$ 5.6 billion per year to 11.8 billion.
ODA has been a key contributor to the decline in hunger levels. But while hunger has declined, overweight and obesity are skyrocketing, and micronutrient malnutrition, often referred to as hidden hunger, has remained static. At the same time, the negative environmental impacts generated from the way we produce food are exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss, and soil degradation. The focus on a few staple crops has made agriculture less resilient to climate shocks and contributed to a food environment that favours unhealthy foods high in and low in nutrients. For the past five years, hunger has only been decreasing sporadically, and only slowly, while health and environmental problems have worsened at an alarming rate.
The donor community faces a choice. It can continue the same trajectory, slowly chipping away at hunger levels within their agriculture, rural development and food security divisions, while leaving other forms of malnutrition and the environment to health and environment divisions.
But this approach no longer makes sense; and some donor agencies have already taken steps to better integrate agricultural development, food security, and nutrition programmes. Lower levels of aid and
higher inflation is also forcing donors to find ways to do more with less. This makes the shift even more imperative.
Donors can contribute to reducing hunger through a stronger focus on nutrition and protection of the
environment. This is the conclusion of this report, which is based on 1,732 individual studies across 83 countries and drawn from 52 high-quality systematic reviews and meta-analyses published over the past 20 years.
The evidence points to ten high-impact, nutrition-sensitive interventions in agrifood system for donors and governments in low income countries to prioritise in their efforts to ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition, while protecting the environment. The interventions target consumption, markets, and production and are: (1) diversification towards fruits, vegetables, and pulses, including agroforestry, (2) sustainable aquaculture and livestock, (3) home gardens, (4) biofortification, (5) storage, distribution, processing and trade infrastructure, (6) food fortification, (7) food safety, (8) shifting and influencing diet choices (through nutrition education, social and behavioural change communication (SBCC), labelling, etc.), (9) nutritious school meals, and (10) food vouchers and cash transfers.
To be effective, interventions need to be designed and implemented in bundles. The value of bundling a portfolio of interventions reduces overall costs and enhances effectiveness. None of these interventions work in isolation, and none produce nutritional outcomes without specific and intentional nutrition objectives in the design and implementation of the interventions, alongside complementary interventions in other sectors. None will protect the environment unless environmental trade-offs are identified, measured, and mitigated. That requires a systems approach.
Currently US$ 8 billion of agriculture and food aid is allocated to these interventions per year, out of a total of US$ 230 billion per year. But aid can no longer serve as a gap filler. Instead, it should be used to catalyse much larger resource flows from the domestic public and private sectors. To achieve this shift requires a change in mindset by focusing on the highest-impact interventions backed by the evidence, incentives that reward the achievement of outcomes rather than activities, and financial and business models that can effectively use small amounts of aid to catalyse larger capital flows.