A/HRC/37/61 I. Introduction 1. The 2017 report entitled The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), declares that currently 815 million people (11 per cent of the global population) are affected by hunger, an increase from 777 million in 2015. This represents a drastic increase after a prolonged decline. Hunger kills more people every year than malaria, tuberculosis and AIDS combined. At this rate, it might be difficult to reach Sustainable Development Goal 2, which is aimed at achieving a world without hunger and malnutrition by 2030. 2. The main causes reversing the progress towards eliminating hunger are armed conflicts, natural disasters and climate change-induced extreme weather events, economic slowdown, and failure of effective social protection and poverty elimination policies. Often, all of the above reasons reinforce each other, creating severe food insecurity despite global cereal production and stocks being at historic highs. 3. Global warming triggers or prolongs natural disasters, causing significant effects on food security. In 2015 and 2016, drought caused by one of the harshest El Niño events on record led to significant crop and livestock losses in sub-Saharan Africa, affecting the livelihoods of farmers and agricultural communities; consecutive failed harvest seasons resulted in wide-scale dependence on food aid, high rates of debt and massive depletion of household seed supplies. African countries are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts on agriculture, since less than 5 per cent of the continent’s cropped area is irrigated. 4. Severe floods in 2017 continued to affect at least 8 million people, causing deaths and injuries, loss of livestock and food supplies, and damage to housing and farming infrastructure. Besides destroying food supplies and sources, such disasters also impact the food production system as a whole, affecting food prices, and have important consequences on communities’ livelihoods. Such situations are likely to continue to affect a large number of people, given that 80 per cent of hungry people currently live in disaster-prone and environmentally degraded areas.1 5. Although the immediate obligation to provide food, water, shelter and medical aid is the duty of governments, in times of emergency the international community has the responsibility to help countries in dire situations. It is clearly asserted in general comment No. 12 (1999) on the right to adequate food, of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, that States are obliged to provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance in times of emergency. These responsibilities are universal, normative and ethical, and are also essential to sustainable world peace, which can only be achievable when hunger and malnutrition are eliminated. 6. In recent decades, the international humanitarian response system has been essential in reducing the negative effects of conflict and natural disasters on food security and in lowering death tolls. While it is larger than ever in terms of financial and human resources, concurrent major emergencies have overstretched its humanitarian operational capacity and ability to meet global demands. 7. According to FAO, worldwide economic losses from natural disasters have reached a staggering average of $250 billion to $300 billion a year. Yet, we know comparatively little about the full impact of such disasters on the agricultural sectors. 8. The World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that food aid expenditures more than doubled between 2009 and 2016, from $2.2 billion to $5.3 billion. Even though international food assistance has risen in response to escalating humanitarian crises, it still falls about $3 billion short. Almost all foreign aid for food security goes to short-term relief operations just to keep people alive, therefore there are no available funds devoted to agricultural investment and rural development, which could raise the quality of food 1 See https://www.wfp.org/content/how-disasters-drive-hunger. 3