A/HRC/25/57 progress and accountability, or for ensuring that food producers and consumers participated in policymaking processes. They did not focus on the most vulnerable and they often failed to guarantee the transformation of support schemes into legal entitlements. 4. Most stakeholders agree, in general terms, on the urgent need for reform. Measured against the requirement that they should contribute to the realization of the right to food, the food systems we have inherited from the twentieth century have failed. Of course, significant progress has been achieved in boosting agricultural production over the past fifty years. But this has hardly reduced the number of hungry people, and the nutritional outcomes remain poor. Using a new method for calculating undernourishment that began with the 2012 edition of the State of Food Insecurity in the World report, United Nations agencies estimate hunger in its most extreme form to have decreased globally from over 1 billion in 1990–1992, representing 18.9 per cent of the world’s population, to 842 million in 2011–2013, or 12 per cent of the population.3 However, these figures do not capture short-term undernourishment, because of their focus on year-long averages; they neglect inequalities in intra-household distribution of food; and the calculations are based on a low threshold of daily energy requirements that assume a sedentary lifestyle, whereas many of the poor perform physically demanding activities.4 5. Calorie intake alone, moreover, says little about nutritional status. Lack of care or inadequate feeding practices for infants, as well as poor health care or water and sanitation, also play a major role. As detailed by the Special Rapporteur (see A/HRC/19/59), even when food intake is sufficient, inadequate diets can result in micronutrient deficiencies such as a lack of iodine, of vitamin A or of iron, to mention only the deficiencies that are the most common in large parts of the developing world. Globally, over 165 million children are stunted – so malnourished that they do not reach their full physical and cognitive potential – and 2 billion people globally lack vitamins and minerals essential for good health. Too little has been done to ensure adequate nutrition, despite the proven long-term impacts of adequate nutrition during pregnancy and before a child’s second birthday, both in low-income countries where undernutrition is the major concern5 and in middle- and high-income countries.6 Moreover, inadequate diets are a major contributing factor to the increase of non-communicable diseases occurring now in all regions of the world. Worldwide, the prevalence of obesity doubled between 1980 and 2008. By 2008, 1.4 billion adults were overweight, including 400 million who were obese and therefore at heightened risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease or gastrointestinal cancers.7 6. The exclusive focus on increasing agricultural production has also had severe environmental impacts. The twentieth-century “Green Revolution” technological package combined the use of high-yielding plant varieties with increased irrigation, the mechanization of agricultural production and the use of nitrogen-based fertilizers and 3 4 5 6 7 4 FAO, International Fund for Agricultural Development and World Food Programme, The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2013: The Multiple Dimensions of Food Security (Rome, 2013), p. 8. F.M. Lappé and others, “How we count hunger matters”, Ethics and International Affairs, issue 27.3 (2013). It has been calculated that for any $1 spent on reducing stunting, $44.50 in returns, as a result of improved earnings, could be expected: J. Hoddinott, M. Rosegrant and M. Torero, “Hunger and malnutrition”, Copenhagen Consensus 2012 challenge paper. A study carried out in the United States shows that access to food stamps in childhood leads to a significant reduction in the incidence of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes in later life and, for women, an increase in economic self-sufficiency: H.W. Hoynes, D.W. Schanzenbach and D. Almond, “Long-run impacts of childhood access to the safety net”, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 18535 (November 2012). World Health Organization, World Health Statistics 2012, p. 36.