“The key to better nutrition, and ultimately to ensuring each person’s right to food, lies in better food systems – smarter approaches, policies and investments encompassing the environment, people, institutions and processes by which agricultural products are produced, processed and brought to consumers in a sustainable manner,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in his message for the Day.

“Every day, more than 840 million people go hungry in a world of plenty. This fact alone should be cause for moral outrage and concerted action.”

The theme of this year’s Day, which is celebrated on 16 October in honour of the date of the founding of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1945, is “Sustainable Food Systems for Food Security and Nutrition.”

A food system is made up of the environment, people, institutions and processes by which agricultural products are produced, processed and brought to consumers. Every aspect of the food system has an effect on the final availability and accessibility of diverse, nutritious foods – and therefore on consumers’ ability to choose healthy diets. However, policies and interventions on food systems are rarely designed with nutrition as their primary objective.

“Addressing malnutrition requires integrated action and complementary interventions in agriculture and the food system, in natural resource management, in public health and education, and in broader policy domains,” FAO said.

The World Food Programme (WFP) stressed that understanding food systems and ending malnutrition can transform individuals, societies and economies, and is central to all development efforts.

“Prioritizing nutrition today is an investment in our collective global future. The investment must involve food, agriculture, health and education systems,” said WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin.

In addition to the 840 million people suffering from chronic hunger, there are some 2 billion people who lack the vitamins and minerals needed to live healthy lives. Poor nutrition also means some 1.4 billion people are overweight, with about one-third obese and at risk of coronary heart disease, diabetes or other health problems.

WFP noted that if the global community invested $1.2 billion per year for five years on reducing micronutrient deficiencies, the benefits in better health, fewer child deaths and increased future earnings would generate gains worth $15.3 billion.

The Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Christiana Figueres stressed that food systems are closely linked to climate change as the latter is making it harder to feed a growing population.

“Aside from permanent shifts in climatic conditions which will affect farming, climate change is causing more and more extreme weather, for example tropical storms, floods and droughts which can push subsistence farmers and others living in food insecurity into dire circumstances,” she said.

“If we are to sustainably feed the world’s population in the future we need to see action today that prepares farmers around the world for the impacts of climate change.”

To mark the Day, FAO will be holding events all week at its headquarters in Rome and around the world on the importance of food systems for food security and nutrition.

Today it will hold a plenary hall with various UN agency officials as well as a high-level seminar on global food losses and waste, and on Thursday a special ceremony will be held to mark the culmination of the International Year of Quinoa, with Nadine Heredia Alarcón de Humala, First Lady of Peru and Special Ambassador for the Year in attendance.

On Sunday FAO will hold the Hunger Run 2013 in central Rome, a 10 kilometre competitive run and a five kilometre non-competitive run/walk to raise funds an anti-hunger field project in the Northern State of Sudan.

“Our partnership with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has helped save millions of lives worldwide across decades of collaboration,” said WFP’s Executive Director, Ertharin Cousin, as she wrapped up a two-day visit to the Kingdom.

She noted that Saudi Arabia has been extremely generous to WFP with a historic pledge of $500 million to feed the millions of people affected by the food crisis that hit the world in 2008, the agency said in a news release.

During the visit, her first to the Gulf region since she assumed her position in April, Cousin met with the Crown Prince, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who serves as Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence.

She expressed her gratitude and appreciation for King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and for the generosity and the long-standing partnership between the country and WFP in fighting hunger around the world.

WFP honoured King Abdullah in 2009 for his generous support of the agency’s work with its highest award by naming him ‘Champion in the Battle Against Hunger.’

Saudi Arabia contributes over 4,000 metric tons of dates to WFP annually, in addition to responding to emergency funding appeals in troubled spots around the world. The agency has received over $1 billion from the Kingdom to fight hunger since the early 1960s.

Cousin also met with the Minister of Agriculture, Fahd Bin Abdulrahman Bin Sulaiman Balghunaim, and discussed with him shared interests in WFP’s response to emergencies in the region, and especially Yemen, Syria and the occupied Palestinian territory.

“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia values the partnership that we have with WFP and we will continue to work together collaboratively so no child goes hungry across the globe,” said the Minister.

In addition, Ms. Cousin briefed several senior government officials on the food security situation in the region and WFP operations worldwide.

“In most cases, people have left behind their homes, their fields and livestock, which are their sole source of food and income,” said the World Food Programme (WFP) Representative in DRC, Martin Ohlsen. “They are therefore – even if they just fled 20 kilometres away from their village – cut off from any sort of support for their families.”

An estimated 390,000 people have been internally displaced in eastern DRC and more than 60,000 Congolese have fled to neighbouring Rwanda and Uganda since fighting erupted in the North Kivu province in April between Government forces and the M23 rebel group.

The conflict is intensifying, WFP said in a news release, with militia groups fighting to extend their zones of influence. Human right violations, including murders, looting, rapes and abductions, have also led to massive population movement in the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, North Katanga, Maniema and Province Orientale.

The new operation, which will target these five provinces, will provide people with high energy biscuits, followed by emergency food rations or, in areas where markets are functioning, cash or vouchers that allow them to purchase their own food.

To fund the emergency operation, the agency has also launched an appeal for $81 million. However, Ohlsen said that so far only 15 per cent of the total cost had been mobilized.

As part of the operation, WFP is boosting the use of innovative tools to increase the efficiency of its emergency assistance such as the distribution of cash and vouchers, which has proved to be cost effective and has helped some 77,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) in North Kivu. The programme will be expanded to other provinces over the next few months, and is planned to cover 188,000 people.

Between January and August, WFP provided food assistance to about 730,000 people displaced in eastern DRC, living in camps, informal settlements or with host families.

In addition to emergency response operations, WFP said it will continue to provide support to the Congolese who face day-to-day struggles such as chronic food insecurity, malnutrition in children and pregnant or nursing women, and a high incidence of HIV and tuberculosis. An additional $84.6 million is required to continue to address these issues in the country, the agency said.

“It’s important not to forget that this crisis in the East is taking place in one of the poorest countries in the world, where 5.4 million people were already facing chronic hunger and malnutrition,” Ohlsen added.

A spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP), Elisabeth Byrs, told reporters in Geneva that the UN agency already assisted six million people in the Sahel during the month of July – but cautioned that humanitarian needs still remained “huge” ahead of the October harvest.

“The increasing frequency of the droughts has had an eroding effect on the Sahel countries’ ability to cope and the local populations have barely had enough time to recover from the 2010 crisis and rebuild their assets before the situation degenerated again,” Byrs said.

Africa’s Sahel region, which stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and parts of Sudan, Cameroon and Nigeria, has been regularly afflicted by food insecurity – UN humanitarian agencies estimate that there are currently some 18 million people facing food insecurity in the region, due to a combination of drought, volatile food prices, as well as political instability in some areas.

Byrs noted that many families were left with nothing to eat and had found their only sustenance in soups made from wild plants so bitter that animals often neglected to eat them.

“To make them edible, peasants boil the plants repeatedly so as to get rid of the bitter taste,” Byrs noted, adding that some households in the Sahel had been without food reserves for some seventh months.

Along with its partners, WFP is scaling up its activities to reach some 10 million people in the region with food assistance over the coming months, despite a $304 million shortfall in the $888 million sought in funding for its response activities in the Sahel.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP), the past several weeks have provided signs of growing distress across the African country with high food prices, empty silos and granaries, and a reduced cereal harvest, aggravating the country’s food security outlook.

“Late and erratic rains, poor agricultural practices, constrained access to inputs, and a reduction in planted area have all contributed to reducing the national cereal harvest by 33 per cent this year,” WFP said in a news release on its Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment (ZimVAC). It further noted that a lack of diversified livelihoods and the rising cost of living were combining to create a perfect storm of income and food insecurity.

WFP, in fact, pointed out that according to the ZimVAC, over 1.6 million Zimbabweans will be in need of food assistance during the peak hunger period spanning January to March 2013.

ZimVAC is an annual study conducted by the Government of Zimbabwe in collaboration with UN agencies and non-governmental organisations in order to estimate national food insecurity levels.

In response to the deteriorating food situation, the UN agency announced it was scaling up operations in conjunction with the Government and other stakeholders to provide a combination of food distribution and cash transfers to those in need.

The WFP further noted that it would require approximately $119 million to complete its operations in Zimbabwe until the end of March 2013, though it said that almost three-quarters of the funding has not yet been accounted for.

On Wednesday afternoon, 32 metric tons of wheat was flown to refugee settlements in Maban County in the year-old nation’s Upper Nile State, WFP’s Executive Director, Ertharin Cousin, said in a statement. The UN official has been in the country for the past two days.

There are some 170,000 Sudanese refugees currently in South Sudan, according to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), with more arriving from Sudan’s South Kordofan and Blue Nile states every day after fleeing conflict and food shortages. Most of the new arrivals are dehydrated and malnourished.

Cousin, who has been meeting with refugees assisted by the WFP, said that today’s wheat shipment was flown in from Ethiopia and was enough to feed 2,100 people for a month, but the ultimate aim was to build resiliency.

“WFP’s goal is not just to meet the immediate needs of those we serve, but to work to ensure that these mothers can, in time, feed their own children,” she said “Building the resilience of the people is foremost in our minds as we work in partnership with the South Sudanese Government.”

South Kordofan and Blue Nile, which lie on the border with South Sudan, have been beset by fighting between Sudanese forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) since last year. The SPLM-N was previously part of the rebel movement that fought for the independence of South Sudan.

“The situation is very serious – our field staff have observed that households in parts of the country have harvested almost nothing,” said WFP Country Director Abdoulaye Diop. “Our first priority will be to make sure that vulnerable people have enough food to sustain themselves through this lean season. At the same time, we must invest in more long-term solutions to build resilience and break the cycle of hunger.”

According to a recent report jointly produced by the Government, UN agencies, and academic and non-governmental organizations, more than 1.6 million people will need food assistance in the coming months, a substantial increase from earlier this year when 202,000 people were in need of food assistance.

While the lean season in Malawi is usually between December and March, a late onset of rain and prolonged dry spells resulted in a decrease of maize production by as much as 40 per cent in some areas. The effects will be felt the most in the southern part of the country.

In addition, the recent devaluation of the national currency by 49 per cent, coupled with soaring inflation at 17.3 per cent, has produced sharp increases in the prices of basic goods and services, pushing the cost of living to unsustainable levels for many Malawians.

Retail maize prices have already increased by 50 per cent compared to the same time last year, and are expected to increase in the lean season.

WFP, along with the Government and other partners, will distribute locally produced maize, pulses and blended food. Cash transfers may also be made available to the most vulnerable to enable them to buy food in areas where market conditions allow.

The agency is urging donors to provide rapid funding support to assist more than one million people starting from August, covering the period until March 2013.

In a news release WFP said its emergency intervention will be implemented in tandem with medium- and longer-term assistance, including school meals, programmes to boost the nutrition of malnourished children and mothers, and resilience-building activities to address chronic food insecurity and disaster risk reduction.

“Up to now, a number of airports are still closed, but as soon as they will re-open, we intend to fly to them,” WFP’s spokesperson Elizabeth Byrs said at a press conference in Geneva, following the landing of a WFP flight in Kayes, in northern Mali, on Thursday.

WFP activities have been disrupted in the country’s north, following a rebel takeover in early April, and 2,000 metric tons of food commodities were feared to have been looted from its warehouses.

The food situation in the country has been worsening since November 2011, with irregular and limited rainfall resulting in a significant drop in food production – grain production has fallen by 41 per cent compared to last year.

According to WFP, in a country where an overwhelming majority of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture as their main source of food and income, such a deficit has serious consequences for the estimated 3.5 million people living in food insecure regions.

Even before the Tuareg rebellion uprooted at least 200,000 people, the northern part of Mali was facing alarming rates of malnutrition, as was most of the Sahel region of West Africa.

On Monday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on the global community to act quickly to address what he described as a “cascading crisis” sweeping the Sahel, where 15 million people have been affected by the drought and conflict-related crisis in the area.

“What this shows is that almost one quarter of the Yemeni population needs emergency food assistance now,” Ms. Alaman added.

The WFP food security survey, which was produced in collaboration with the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Yemeni Central Statistical Organisation (CSO), also found that a further five million people are at risk of becoming severely food insecure as they face rising food prices and conflict. In urban areas, where civil unrest has hit hardest, more than a quarter of households said insecurity had reduced their ability to buy food.

In a news release, WFP said it has scaled up its humanitarian assistance this year to feed 3.6 million vulnerable people who cannot afford food or have been displaced due to the violence in the northern and the southern regions of the country.

WFP stressed that it is prioritizing 1.8 million severely food insecure Yemenis, particularly women and children, who are living in the poorest 14 governorates, as well as some 670,000 internally displaced and conflict-affected people.

The survey also underlined that chronic malnutrition among children is of serious concern. In the governorate of Al Mahweet, for example, an estimated 63.5 per cent of the children are suffering from stunted growth.

The survey, which was conducted during November and December last year, interviewed almost 8,000 households in 19 out of 21 governorates, and examined the nutritional and food consumption status of more than 11,000 children and about 10,000 mothers between the ages of 15 and 49.