2. Introduction

Despite a dozen years of solemn pledges by global leaders to take action to drastically decrease world hunger – promises made at the World Food Summit in 1996, the Millennium Summit of 2000 and high-level follow-up meetings held since then – global food security has been deteriorating since 1995. This has contributed to the unacceptably slow pace of reducing hunger and undernourishment and of cutting the prevalence of malnutrition. Between 1990 and 2005, the prevalence of underweight children under 5 years of age in the developing world only fell from 30% to 23%. In 34 countries in 2009, progress in reducing child underweight was very slow, and 20 countries had made no progress at all. With an estimated increase of 105 million undernourished people in 2009 alone, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that approximately 925 million individuals went hungry in 2010 (FAO 2010d). For many developing countries, meeting the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving prevalence of underweight (target 1.8) and undernourishment (target 1.9) between 1990 and 2015 will not be possible. Against this disappointing background, three major challenges have arisen that further threaten efforts to overcome food insecurity and malnutrition: climate change, the growing use of food crops as a source of fuel (bioenergy) and volatile food prices.