World Food Assistance: Preventing Food Crises Report Launch

Launch of World Food Programmes's World Food Assistance: Preventing Food Crises report. Find the news release here. 

About this report: 

Chronic hunger is increasing, and food crises are spreading and intensifying. World Food Assistance 2018: Preventing Food Crises (WoFA 2018) focuses on these crises, and asks what causes them to break out, what determines their scale and how they might be prevented.

Existing knowledge suggests that food crises are driven by combinations of short-term events such as conflicts and natural disasters and long-term influencers of poverty and food insecurity. Hence the prevention of food crises entails short-term action and long-term investment. But precisely which actions and investments should be prioritized in different contexts, and why, are still not clear.

WoFA 2018 seeks to reduce this knowledge gap through ground-breaking analysis of linkages between food assistance expenditures by WFP and a range of other factors. Food assistance is uniquely positioned at the intersection of short-term humanitarian action and long-term hunger reduction. Food assistance expenditures thus constitute a powerful lens through which the drivers and deterrents of outbreak and intensity of food crises can be examined. The vision of this report is that increased understanding of the drivers of food assistance will lead to greater comprehension of the causes of food crises. This should in turn expand scope to prevent them.