BY JEMIMAH NJUKI Somewhere in rural South Asia, a very enterprising woman toils for about 18 hours a day to feed and care for her family. However, despite working to the point of endangering her own health, she only gets a fraction of her labor. The bulk of her returns go to the landowner. I met Kapilaben during the South Asia
BY JULIE KURTZ AND DREW SAMPLE Our food system has a plastic problem. Macro- and micro-plastic pollution is contaminating aquatic and agricultural ecosystems—threatening food security. Plastics are entering food chains, threatening both animal and human health. Meanwhile, as diets increasingly include more packaged ultra-processed and fast foods, the food system itself is generating more and more plastic pollution. Takeout food and beverage
BY KIBROM A. ABAY, MULUBRHAN AMARE, LUCA TIBERTI,KWAW S. ANDAM AND MICHAEL WANG COVID-19 has disrupted programs that assist vulnerable populations worldwide. In addition to education, schools provide daily meals and other services that many families depend on; when schools closed during the pandemic, those services ceased. Kibrom Abay and colleagues explore the food security consequences of school closures in
BY DANIELLE RESNICK On July 28, local governments were given center stage at the United Nations Food Systems Pre-Summit dialogues to discuss how to tackle food insecurity and nutrition. This reflects the growing prominence of local governments in civic life around the world—the outcome of processes of decentralization unfolding globally since the early 1990s. Decentralization involves the transfer of certain administrative functions,
BY SWATI MALHOTRA AND ROB VOS Global hunger has been on the rise since 2014, and the world is not on track to achieve the goal of Zero Hunger (SDG2). If current trends continue without concerted and collaborative actions to tackle the challenge, 840 million people will come under the grip of hunger by 2030. The COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the
BY SUMAN CHAKRABARTI, SAMUEL SCOTT, HAROLD ALDERMAN, PURNIMA MENON AND DANIEL GILLIGAN By April 2020, schools in 170 countries were closed to curtail COVID-19 transmission. In India, 247 million children have been out of the classroom for over a year. Beyond the devastating consequences school closures are having on learning, health experts are particularly concerned about vulnerable Indian children missing out on
BY UMA LELE AND MARK ROSEGRANT Increasing public and private investment in agricultural research and innovation by only $4 billion per year would achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG 2) in East Asia, South Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean and reduce the risk of hunger from 24.3% to 11.8% of the population of Africa south of the Sahara.
BY ANISHA MOHAN The severe health and economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have disrupted food systems and upended livelihoods across the globe. South Asia, with its population of almost 2 billion people, accounted for nearly half of all new, known infections worldwide as the second wave battered the region in 2021. While many early expert predictions about dire impacts on economy and poverty