2012 Global Hunger Index

The 2012 Global Hunger Index, published by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in collaboration with Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe, was launched in October 2012. This year’s report focuses on ‘how to ensure sustainable food security under conditions of land, water, and energy stresses’.

The Index itself, discussed in Chapter 2, is a measure of the proportion of people suffering chronic hunger across the world. The 2012 Index is based on data from 2005 to 2010 for 120 countries and classifies countries and regions into categories from ‘low’ (low score) to ‘extremely alarming’ (high score).

For the globe, GHI has fallen by 26% from the 1990 world GHI, from a score of 19.8 to 14.7 but 20 countries have levels of hunger that fall in the ‘alarming’ or ‘extremely alarming’ categories. With the exception of North Korea, all the countries in which the hunger situation worsened from the 1990 GHI to the 2012 GHI are in Sub-Saharan Africa and in countries such as Burundi, Eritrea and Haiti over 50% of the population are undernourished. Only one country in Sub-Saharan Africa—Ghana—is among the 10 best performers in improving their GHI score since 1990. In terms of regions, however, South Asia has the highest 2012 GHI score.

The report goes further than the index, however, exploring evidence of land, water and energy scarcity in developing countries and putting forward a sustainable and unsustainable future scenario for trends in resource use. The report concludes with a plan of action in three areas:

• Responsible governance of natural resources: getting the policy frameworks right
• Scaling up technical approaches: addressing the nexus
• Addressing the drivers of natural resource scarcity: managing the risks

For more information about the 2012 Global Hunger Index click here.