The All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Agriculture and Food for Development has just published a new report, ‘Why no thought for food?’, which compiles responses from leading authorities in the field of agriculture to its inquiry into the UK’s role in addressing global food security.
This report unveils the fact that spending on agricultural programmes currently makes up just 3% of the Department for International Development’s (DFID) total annual aid expenditure. Despite the World Bank having uncovered that economic growth from agriculture generates at least twice as much poverty reduction as growth from any other sector, DFID has continued to oversee the steep decline in global Official Development Assistance (ODA) spent on agriculture, its share having fallen from 17% of ODA in 1982 to just 3.7% in 2002. In sub-Saharan Africa, the region worst hit by hunger and malnutrition, agriculture spending represents 0.3% of the DFID’s total aid. Continue reading
According to the United Nations, 2009 has been a devastating year for the world’s hungry, marking a significant worsening of an already disappointing trend in global food security since 1996. The global economic slowdown, following on the heels of the food crisis in 2006–08, has deprived an additional 100 million people of access to adequate food. There have been marked increases in hunger in all of the world’s major regions, and more than one billion people are now estimated to be undernourished. 
