Climate change directly affects food security and nutrition. It undermines current efforts to protect the lives and livelihoods and end the suffering of the over 1 billion food insecure people and will increase the risk of hunger and malnutrition by an unprecedented scale within the next decades.

Two formidable challenges seem to overarch agriculture and food production in this century: how to end hunger and how to keep global warming at a level that will allow humanity and the agroecosystems we depend upon to adapt in a noncatastrophic way.

Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. The four pillars of food security are availability, access, utilization and stability. The nutritional dimension is integral to the concept of food security and to the work of CFS.

Two key challenges facing humanity today stem from changes within global food and climate systems. The 2008 food price crisis and global warming have brought food security and

Although many millions of people have exited poverty in recent decades, much of the reduction in poverty has benefited people living close to the poverty line rather than those at the very bottom of the income distribution. This book is not focused on poverty per se but rather is focused on looking particularly at those most deprived in society.

Agriculture both affects and is affected by climate change. No other sector is more climate-sensitive. Agricultural and food production in developing countries will be adversely affected by climate change, especially in countries that are already climate-vulnerable (drought, flood and cyclone prone), and that have low incomes and high incidence of hunger and poverty.

This report details the investment required to ensure food security in 2050, noting both the impacts of climate change on agricultural production, as well as the mitigation potential of agriculture.

The Global Hunger Index (GHI) shows that worldwide progress in reducing hunger remains slow. The 2009 global GHI has fallen by only one quarter from the 1990 GHI.

Learning from successes in agricultural development is now more urgent than ever. Progress in feeding the world