The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger and improve nutrition and food security. Its Latin motto,fiat panis,translates to "let there be bread". It was founded on 16 October 1945.
The World Food Programme (WFP) is an international organization within the United Nations that provides food assistance worldwide. It is the world's largest humanitarian organization and the leading provider of school meals. Founded in 1961,WFP is headquartered in Rome and has offices in 87 countries. In 2023 it supported over 152 million people,and is present in more than 120 countries and territories.
In politics,humanitarian aid,and the social sciences,hunger is defined as a condition in which a person does not have the physical or financial capability to eat sufficient food to meet basic nutritional needs for a sustained period. In the field of hunger relief,the term hunger is used in a sense that goes beyond the common desire for food that all humans experience,also known as an appetite. The most extreme form of hunger,when malnutrition is widespread,and when people have started dying of starvation through lack of access to sufficient,nutritious food,leads to a declaration of famine.
Famine relief is an organized effort to reduce starvation in a region in which there is famine. A famine is a phenomenon in which a large proportion of the population of a region or country are so undernourished that death by starvation becomes increasingly common. In spite of the much greater technological and economic resources of the modern world,famine still strikes many parts of the world,mostly in the developing nations.
Sir David Nunes Nabarro is a British Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization. He has made his career in the international civil service,working for either the Secretary-General of the United Nations or the Director-General of the World Health Organization. Since February 2020,he has helped the DGWHO deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
An under-secretary-general of the United Nations (USG) is a senior official within the United Nations System,normally appointed by the General Assembly on the recommendation of the secretary-general for a renewable term of four years. Under-secretary-general is the third highest rank in the United Nations,after the secretary-general and the deputy secretary-general. The rank is held by the heads of different UN entities,certain high officials of the United Nations Secretariat,and high-level envoys. The United Nations regards the rank as equal to that of a cabinet minister of a member state,and under-secretaries-general have diplomatic immunity under the UN Charter.
The North Korean famine,also known as the Arduous March,was a period of mass starvation together with a general economic crisis from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea. During this time there was an increase in defection from North Korea which peaked towards the end of the famine period.
Catherine Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under-Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs,the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Group (UNSDG),previously the United Nations Development Group (UNDG),is a group of 36 United Nations funds,programmes,specialized agencies,departments and offices that play a role in development. It was created by the Secretary-General of the United Nations in order to improve the effectiveness of United Nations development activities at the country level.
Fill the Cup is a campaign of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP),the world's largest humanitarian aid agency. In 2009,WFP plans to feed over 100 million people in 77 of the world's poorest countries. "Fill the Cup" aims to use the symbol of the Red Cup to raise awareness of global hunger,specifically involving hungry school children. About 59 million primary school age children attend school hungry across the developing world,with 23 million of them in 45 African countries.
Susana Mabel Malcorra is an Argentine electrical engineer who served as foreign minister of Argentina from 2015 to 2017. She was announced for the position by President Mauricio Macri on 24 November 2015. Prior to that she was Chef de Cabinet to the Executive Office at the United Nations,appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in March 2012 and served as his chief of staff between April 2012 and November 2016.
Purchase for Progress (P4P) is an initiative of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP),involving over 500 partnerships,including Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation,the Howard G. Buffett Foundation,FAO,ACDI/VOCA,TechnoServe and others. Launched in September 2008 as a five-year pilot,P4P sought to explore programming and procurement modalities with the greatest potential to stimulate agricultural and market development in ways that maximized benefits to smallholder farmers. The program,largely developed by the eleventh Executive Director of the WFP,Josette Sheeran,arose as the WFP desired to purchase food in a way that was part of the "solution to hunger". These efforts are aligned with recommendations issued by the UN Committee on Economic,Social and Cultural Rights that call for an establishment of programs in support of socially vulnerable groups. and to the Zero Hunger Challenge launched by the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Special UN Reporter 2012–2014,Olivier De Schutter,claimed that public procurement systems favour economically strong bidders,thus excluding smallholder farmers. His conclusion was that public procurement schemes supportive of smallholders could have "powerful impacts on the reduction of rural poverty." P4P is built upon this very principle as it enables low-income farmers to supply food to the WFP's operations. Eventually,the transaction can be regulated by a forward contract,with the farmer agreeing to sell in the future a certain amount of output at a fixed price. Essentially,the P4P program aims to create a wide and sophisticated market for commodities in developing countries.
Ertharin Cousin is an American lawyer who served as the twelfth executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme from 2012 to 2017. Following the completion of her term,Cousin became Payne Distinguished Professor at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies,distinguished fellow at the Center on Food Security and the Environment and the Center on Democracy,Development and the Rule of Law,accepted an appointment as a distinguished fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs,and became a trustee on the UK based Power of Nutrition Board of Directors.
James Charles Ingram was an Australian diplomat,philanthropist and author whose career culminated in his post as the eighth executive director of the World Food Programme (WFP),a position which he occupied for ten years.
Since 2016,a food insecurity crisis has been ongoing in Yemen which began during the Yemeni civil war. The UN estimates that the war has caused an estimated 130,000 deaths from indirect causes which include lack of food,health services,and infrastructure as of December 2020. In 2018,Save the Children estimated that 85,000 children have died due to starvation in the three years prior. In May 2020,UNICEF described Yemen as "the largest humanitarian crisis in the world",and estimated that 80% of the population,over 24 million people,were in need of humanitarian assistance. In September 2022,the World Food Programme estimated that 17.4 million Yemenis struggled with food insecurity,and projected that number would increase to 19 million by the end of the year,describing this level of hunger as "unprecedented." The crisis is being compounded by an outbreak of cholera,which resulted in over 3000 deaths between 2015 and mid 2017. While the country is in crisis and multiple regions have been classified as being in IPC Phase 4,an actual classification of famine conditions was averted in 2018 and again in early 2019 due to international relief efforts. In January 2021,two out of 33 regions were classified as IPC 4 while 26 were classified as IPC 3.
Hurricane Matthew struck southwestern Haiti near Les Anglais on October 4,2016,leaving widespread damage in the impoverished nation. Matthew was a late-season Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir–Simpson scale,having formed in the southeastern Caribbean on September 28. The hurricane weakened to Category 4 before making landfall near Les Anglais on October 4,at which time the National Hurricane Center estimated maximum sustained winds of 240 km/h (150 mph). This made it the strongest storm to hit the nation since Hurricane Cleo in 1964,and the third strongest Haitian landfall on record. Hurricane-force winds –119 km/h (74 mph) or greater –affected about 1.125 million people in the country. The Haitian government assessed the death toll at 674,although other sources reported more than three times that figure.
In the early months of 2017,parts of South Sudan experienced a famine following several years of instability in the country's food supply caused by war and drought. The famine,largely focused in the northern part of the country,affected an estimated five million people. In May 2017,the famine was officially declared to have weakened to a state of severe food insecurity.
Denise Brown is a Canadian Senior UN official and the current Head of the United Nations in Ukraine. She was appointed to this position on 28 July 2022. Prior to this appointment,she served as Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General (DSRSG),Humanitarian Coordinator and Resident Coordinator in the Central African Republic.
During the COVID-19 pandemic,food insecurity intensified in many places. In the second quarter of 2020,there were multiple warnings of famine later in the year. In an early report,the Nongovernmental Organization (NGO) Oxfam-International talks about "economic devastation" while the lead-author of the UNU-WIDER report compared COVID-19 to a "poverty tsunami". Others talk about "complete destitution","unprecedented crisis","natural disaster","threat of catastrophic global famine". The decision of the WHO on 11 March 2020,to qualify COVID as a pandemic,that is "an epidemic occurring worldwide,or over a very wide area,crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people" also contributed to building this global-scale disaster narrative.
The United Nations response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been led by its Secretary-General and can be divided into formal resolutions at the General Assembly and at the Security Council (UNSC),and operations via its specialized agencies and chiefly the World Health Organization in the initial stages,but involving more humanitarian-oriented agencies as the humanitarian impact became clearer,and then economic organizations,like the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development,the International Labour Organization,and the World Bank,as the socioeconomic implications worsened.
