Anticipate and Localize: Leveraging Humanitarian Funding To Create More Sustainable Food Systems

A year into a global food crisis that is reversing decades of progress in the fight against hunger and malnutrition, a new report from The Rockefeller Foundation calls for novel solutions to address massive shortfalls in humanitarian aid and improve long-term food security by increasing sustainability.

The report, “Anticipate and localize: Leveraging humanitarian funding to create more sustainable food systems,” identifies crucial reforms to humanitarian food aid that would improve response to crises, avert future crisis, and help build resilient, sustainable food systems.

It is the second of four reports from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Nutrition Security portfolio, led by Catherine Bertini, former Executive Director of the World Food Programme and 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. The Report Chair is Carol Bellamy, former Executive Director of UNICEF. They draw on decades of experience in the global humanitarian and development sectors.

In addition, the report is informed by the Foundation-sponsored Convening Group on Funding for Sustainable Food Security, which brought together nearly two dozen experts in food insecurity and food aid from around the world, including people with lived experience, to examine how to best mobilize and leverage funding to ensure food security for all. Three convenings held in late 2022 generated an abundance of creative and provocative ideas to overcome the severe shortcomings in the global governance and delivery of food aid.

The report identifies those shortcomings as a lack of effective anticipation of need; a lack of localization; and a failure to break silos and join the funding “dots.” Its recommendations address each of those shortcomings with specific, concrete actions that should be taken now and over the next seven-to-ten years to reset the world on the path of food security for all through aligning humanitarian aid and global development to build resilient and sustainable food systems.