This report by the World Bank highlights the acute threat of climate change to poor people that result from the impacts on food security. The key message is that efforts to curb climate change must be twinned with programmes to cut poverty, if we are to keep climate change from pushing more than 100 million people back into poverty in just 15 years (by 2030).

In this article in The Conversation Tim Lang discusses two recent reports that have been published discussing food poverty and food banks in Britain.

The journal Food and Nutrition Security has produced a special issue on the question: “can science and good governance deliver dinner?’  The guest editor Voster Muchenje provides this overview of its rationale and contents for the FCRN:

2015 marks the tenth year of the Global Hunger Index (GHI), which measures the state of hunger at the global, regional, and national level.  This report states that even though tremendous progress has been made towards eliminating global hunger, there is still a long way to go.

This joint survey by the Food Standards Agency, Foodsafe and the Consumer Council in Northern Ireland finds that low ­income families need to spend at least one third of their weekly income on food if they want to eat healthily.  This percentage was the result when consumers were asked to select a realistic, healthy food basket that met the family’s taste requirements and included some special food items for visitors and social occasions.

In 2007/8 world food prices spiked and global economic crisis set in, leaving hundreds of millions of people unable to access adequate food. The international reaction was swift. In a bid for leadership, the 123 member countries of the United Nations’ Committee on World Food Security (CFS) adopted a series of reforms with the aim of becoming the foremost international, inclusive and intergovernmental platform for food security.

A new paper published in Environmental Science and Technology finds that measures to mitigate agricultural GHG emissions potentially risk increasing global hunger more than the impacts of climate change on crop yields itself.  The study draws upon global models to quantify:  a. the impact of climate change on yields in the absence of mitigation, b. the impact of bionergy production (as one mitigation measure) on competition for land and associated food prices and c. finally, the costs associated with mitigating the impacts of climate change by introducing a carbon tax.  Introduction of this tax is assumed to lead to increase in use of renewable fuels (wind, power, geothermal, bionenergy) and ‘abatement from non energy sources’ – which presumably includes agriculture although they do not specify what sort of abatement this would be.

This study argues that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings. It looks at three models used by U.S. and European agencies, and finds that all three estimate that some of the crops diverted from food to biofuels are not replaced by planting crops elsewhere. About 20 to 50 percent of the net calories diverted to make ethanol are not replaced through the planting of additional crops.

The British government has failed to tackle poor nutrition and diet, and should do more to take public health nutrition into consideration in every area of policy, says a report by the UK Coronary Prevention Group, a charity dedicated to preventing heart disease through healthy lifestyles.