Food Security: Past Progress and Prospects Through 2025
In 1996, the US, the EC, and 184 other countries gathered at the World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome and pledged to reduce the number of food-insecure people by half by no later than 2015. This declaration emphasized improving the performance of the agricultural sectors, particularly in low-income countries. To that end, there was a call for increased public and private investment in technology and its transfer, improved input distribution, greater access to land and credit, and better integration with world markets.
Now the US Economic Research Service (ERS) of the US department of Agriculture has analyzed the food availability in 76 low- and middle-income countries. Thirty-eight of countries studied are estimated to have met the WFS goal of halving the number of food-insecure people between 1995 and 2015. Latin America and the Caribbean region saw the steepest decline in the number of food-insecure people, followed closely by the Asian region. However, over the next decade, food security of the study countries is projected to deteriorate at the aggregate level, largely due to several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
