Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, limitations of leadership, governance and coordination are inhibiting the ability of the UN Rome-based agencies to facilitate progress towards ending hunger.
Progress towards Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger (SDG2) had already stalled prior to the impact of COVID-19 and efforts to reduce hunger are likely to endure further disruption. According to the latest annual State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report, efforts to achieve SDG2 floundered before the pandemic, with food insecurity stagnant from 2015 to 2019 due to climate change impacts, conflicts and economic slowdowns. In the context of COVID-19, undernourishment is expected to increase, with 768 million people estimated to have faced malnutrition in 2020, 118 million more than in 2019. This figure of 768 million amounts to nearly one in 10 people on the planet (9.9 per cent). A lack of coordinated political engagement and prioritization has contributed to these trends.
While country-led domestic strategies are the most important and effective way of ending hunger, the global institutional architecture in the food and agricultural space can help or hinder these strategies. This space is comprised of many actors including multilateral institutions, bilateral organizations, civil society and the private sector. Yet, there is a general consensus that this architecture is fragmented due to the sheer number of actors, overlapping mandates, competition for scarce resources, and poor coordination. Furthermore, there is some concern over the incoherence of donor policies for agriculture that claim to target small-scale producers and empower women – specifically related to SDG2.3 – but appear to focus more on promoting commercialization and exports. Fragmentation and policy concerns have led to longstanding debates over the reform of multilateral institutions, initiatives and partnerships in the food and agricultural space.
Among the plethora of actors working towards SDG2, the three UN Rome-based agencies (RBAs) – the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the World Food Programme (WFP) – play critical and complementary roles. There is clearly the potential for the RBAs to facilitate progress towards SDG2, yet leadership, governance and coordination limitations are inhibiting their ability to do so. The objective of this paper is to analyse these key aspects of the three RBAs and to recommend specific actions that can enhance their capacity to contribute to SDG2.
This paper proposes important reforms, which are derived from an extensive review of the literature as well as 25 semi-structured interviews with individuals that represent member states in Rome, members of RBA management, civil society, the private sector and research agencies. This was complemented by a further 18 interviews with people linked to development finance institutions – International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) – and seven interviews with individuals from institutions across the global health architecture including the World Health Organization (WHO) and selected WHO partners. The 25 interviews from other institutions were used to draw lessons for the RBAs. In selecting the 50 informants, efforts were made to ensure diversity by country of origin, gender and institutional affiliation.
The findings fit with the evolution of thinking among member states of the RBAs, which have pushed for changes in RBA management over the last decade. As a result, some progress has been made in the areas of leadership, governance and coordination. In many ways, the proposed reforms presented in this paper seek to solidify and consolidate the existing thinking of member states and those engaged with the RBAs.
