A Comprehensive Approach to Ending Global Hunger
Decades of research and action on the problem of hunger have shown that a comprehensive approach comprising a broad range of activities is required. This comprehensive strategy, which would also ensure that gender and natural resource management principles are integrated throughout, is based on four main categories:
Emergency Operations
Emergency programs are essential for meeting basic human needs in the wake of a natural disaster, conflict, or acute economic difficulties. With natural disasters increasing in number by 400 percent over the past two decades and the number of people displaced by conflict and violence rising from 17.4 to 27.5 million since 1997, these programs are more important than ever.
Drought in the Sahel region has brought hunger to millions of people for the third time in recent years. See how WFP and its partners are responding to this emergency and bringing food assistance to more than 10 million people in eight countries.
Safety Net Programs
Safety net programs, like school feeding and food for assets programs, help limit the impact of crises on vulnerable populations and reduce reliance on more costly emergency interventions. Safety nets help hungry, poor people maintain access to food and other assets to protect their livelihoods and to prevent them from falling more deeply into poverty.
See how the MERET Program in Ethiopia enabled communities to better withstand the drought and hunger crisis that affected more than 13 million people in the Horn of Africa in 2011.
Nutrition
Malnutrition during the first 1,000 days of a child's life not only causes irreversible damage, but is responsible for 3.5 million children's deaths every year. Strong nutrition programs focus on children in the most critical window of human development -- the 1,000 days from pregnancy to age two. Nutrition programs ensure that the most vulnerable people have adequate access to the required calories and nutrients to develop properly.
See how WFP's nutrition programs helped bring Sadak, a young Somali child, and Namuding, a young Kenyan mother, back from severe malnutrition.
Agricultural Development
Helping small-holder farmers -- most of whom are women -- improve the quantity and quality of their yields and building the infrastructure that allows them to get their crops to market, is one of the most effective ways to help end hunger. Half of the world's hungry people are from small-holder farming communities, surviving off marginal lands prone to natural disasters like drought or flood. Investing in the agricultural sector of developing countries is essential to increasing the availability of food and ensuring sustainable livelihoods among the world's poor and hungry people.
See how a rural farming cooperative in Tanzania gained access to profitable markets and scaled up their operations through investments and trainings thanks to the Purchase for Progress program.
