In the Addis Ababa Action Agenda, Governments committed to prioritize the fight against hunger and malnutrition and to adequately support sustainable agriculture. These commitments are largely consistent with the SDGs (SDG 2 to end hunger, achieve food security, improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture; SDG target 12.3 on halving food losses and waste). The Addis Agenda includes several additional aspects. First, it underscores that combatting hunger is multifaceted, and emphasizes the importance of rural development and addressing urban poverty in fighting hunger. Second, it puts a greater focus on implementation and financing. One key area that the Addis Agenda emphasizes is the need to increase both public and private investment and to align financing with sustainable development. Third, in addition to focusing on smallholders and women farmers, the Addis Agenda addresses mechanisms, such as agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ networks, as potentially playing a greater role in rural development and poverty reduction.
Specifically, the Addis Agenda:
- Commits to take action to fight malnutrition and hunger, including among the urban poor; and to strengthen efforts to enhance food security and nutrition, focused on smallholders, women farmers, and agricultural cooperatives and farmers’ networks
- Commits to support sustainable agriculture, including forestry, fisheries and pastoralism
- Encourages increased private investment and commits to increasing public investment, particularly for financing research, infrastructure and pro-poor initiatives
- Commits to significantly reduce post-harvest food loss and waste
- Calls on WTO members to correct and prevent trade restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets, including through the parallel elimination of all forms of agricultural export subsidies and disciplines on all export measures with equivalent effect
- Commits to ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets and their derivatives; Commits to facilitate timely, accurate and transparent access to market information in an effort to ensure that commodity markets appropriately reflect underlying demand and supply changes and help limit excess volatility
Latest developments
Data to End Hunger - the 50x2030 initiative: In 2019, a coalition of low-income countries, bilateral donors, multilateral organizations and philanthropies committed significant funding in a single multi-donor trust fund mechanism to support agriculture statistics across 50 low- and lower-middle-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America by 2030. The goal is to support key agriculture statistics for targeted food production solutions, including increasing sustainable production by smallholder farmers in these countries by the 2030 impact deadline. To enable this, several donors collaboratively committed an estimated $200 million in a World Bank Trust Fund, which has so far leveraged $300 million of World Bank Regional International Development Association for investments in the African region and mobilized further domestic resources in individual countries.
See also