This year’s Africa Agriculture Status Report (AASR) focuses on accelerating African food systems. This theme plays a critical role in not only shaping human diets and health outcomes but in also ensuring the sustainability of the environment in which food is produced, processed, distributed, sold, and consumed.

Measurement of food access typically relies on a consensus of different indicators. However, there is a growing list of surveys in which the Food Insecurity Experience Scale is one of the few food access indicators captured, likely because it is an official measure for tracking progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger.

Food and nutrition insecurity in the SADC region continues to be unacceptably high, requiring concerted efforts for the region to build resilience to address the multiple and increasing shocks it faces.

An analysis by humanitarian organisation CARE highlights, for the first time, a global link between gender inequality and food insecurity. Analysing data from 2021, the report shows that across 109 countries, as gender inequality goes up, food security goes down.

There is a need for detailed analyses of the interplay between nutrition security and climate change, and their impact on different target groups, especially youth and women. This desk review explores the evidence on climate change mitigation and adaptation measures with nutrition co-benefits, and vice versa.

The 29th edition of UNEP’s Foresight Brief explores the use of plastic in agriculture and the significant waste problem this entails which impacts on soil health, biodiversity, productivity and food security. Plastics are used extensively in farming, from plastic coated seeds to mulch film.

In Ethiopia, nearly 10 million people, including 4.4 million children, are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance in drought-impacted areas. Four consecutive failed rainy seasons have brought on severe drought in Ethiopia’s lowland regions of Afar, Oromia, the Southern Nations Nationalities, Peoples’ (SNNPR) and Somali regions.

Record high food prices have triggered a global crisis that will drive millions more into extreme poverty, magnifying hunger and malnutrition, while threatening to erase hard-won gains in development.

The fourth edition of the IGAD Regional Focus of the Global Report on Food Crises highlights the alarming high level of acute food insecurity in 2021 in the region, where about 42 million people were estimated to be in Crisis or worse (IPC Phase 3 or above), exceeding the previous three-year high in 2020 by nearly 33 percent.

Food affordability is an important determinant of food choice and access, driving dietary patterns, nutrition status and overall health and environmental outcomes.