Bemoaning world hunger figures which have persistently remained high for three consecutive years, despite a slight reduction this year, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean said it will continue to explore innovative financing options as it moves to address hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition in all forms.

In its recent release of the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) 2024 report the body said that estimating gaps in financing for food security and nutrition while mobilising innovative ways of financing to bridge these issues continue to rank among top priorities.

“Policies, legislation and interventions to end hunger and ensure all people have access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food (SDG Target 2.1), and to end all forms of malnutrition (SDG Target 2.2) need significant resource mobilisation,” the FAO report noted.

“They are not only an investment in the future, but our obligation and we strive to guarantee the right to adequate food and nutrition of current and future generations,” the report continued.

Admitting that while the world is still far off track in achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, which seeks to have zero hunger across the world, the FAO in its report said that irrespective of exactly how much financing is needed to meet the SDG sub-targets, the cost of not mobilising it is what will be most detrimental. This, even as the lack of improvement in food security and the uneven progress in the economic access to healthy diets continue to cast a shadow over the possibility of achieving zero hunger in the world, six years shy of the 2030 deadline.

In redefining financing in the area, the FAO said it has begun to carefully examine how financing flows are categorised and reported, taking into account the various public and private investments in the area, including official development assistance (ODA) and other official flows (OOF). The study found that despite some US$77 billion being earmarked for global food security and nutrition in 2021, “not even a quarter of these flows for all aid sectors were allocated to food security and nutrition between 2017 and 2021.”

Due to different cost estimates, and existing gaps in the data, the report called for strong economic models to be used in order to estimate the necessary additional investments needed to mostly reduce hunger, but also to address nutrition concerns. Warning against the cost of inaction or slow action, this year’s report indicated that the cost of not bridging the financing gap will result in millions of people, up to the 2030 mark and beyond, remaining hungry, food insecure, malnourished and unable to afford a healthy diet. An outcome, which it said, could have medium- to long-term socio-economic and health repercussions

“While grants and low- or no-interest loans are certainly among the most traditional concessional finance instruments, they can be designed in more innovative ways to collaborate with de-risking initiatives to increase private financing flows, as part of blended finance strategies,” the report said in outlining aspects of innovative financing measures.

“Grants and/or loans, jointly implemented with technical assistance, can be leveraged to address the main limitations for accessing private financing flows — poor bankability and lack of operational readiness to access finance — often faced by food security and nutrition initiatives,” it added.

Greater inclusion of the private sector in improving the financial architecture in the areas of food security and nutrition, the report said, will also significantly help to achieve some global health, environmental and social outcomes.

In the LAC region where advanced steps have been taken to reduce hunger levels from 6.9 per cent in 2021 to 6.2 per cent in 2023, with over four million people stopped being hungry as a result, the FAO said that while some progress has been made, a lot more needs to be done to fix structural inequalities and issues surrounding various financial flows in the region.

“Hunger and food insecurity are not simply issues of food scarcity; they reflect structural inequalities and systemic failures that affect human dignity and social justice throughout the world and also in the region,” FAO assistant director general and regional representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, Mario Lubetkin said.

Having the opportunity to reflect on these experiences forces us to recognise that hunger is a reality that can be addressed with responsibility, determination, and collective work and to ensure that all people, regardless of their geographic location, gender, or economic status, have access to sufficient and nutritious food,” he further stated.

The FAO currently working with countries to improve the collection of reliable information and data for better monitoring of food security and nutrition in the region, said these efforts will result in the use of customised international methodologies for measuring the cost and affordability of healthy diets to fit the unique context of Caribbean countries such as Guyana, Jamaica, and Grenada. In collaborating with the Caricom Secretariat, the entity also wants to ensure a more accurate food security mapping which reflects local realities and drives policy changes.

The Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) being integrated across the Caribbean is expected to provide essential data for tracking food insecurity in the region.

“The ultimate goal is to help countries build national capacity by providing training and guidance to effectively utilise adapted methodologies within their existing national data collection systems and initiatives. These efforts aim to empower countries to produce up-to-date information for better monitoring and decision-making in further support of the SDGs as well as regional and national policies, including the Caricom’s 25×25 strategy,” the FAO said.