Humanitarian assistance organizations should shift their approach to donors to address the current global food crisis as well as to build sustainable food and nutrition security and avert future crises, a report from the Rockefeller Foundation finds.

Drawing upon on insights of nearly two dozen experts in food insecurity and food aid from around the world, the report, Anticipate and Localize: Leveraging Humanitarian Funding To Create More Sustainable Food Systems (72 pages, PDF), recommends that donor approaches shift to align more closely with solutions that strengthen food system resilience to climate change, conflict, and other shocks. According to the report, the humanitarian assistance system comprises several actors, including the multi-agency United Nations, governments, multilateral development banks, nongovernmental organizations, and private donors. Yet, despite the enormous resources deployed, coordination among these actors is weak, resulting in failure to anticipate crisis and invest proactively and failure to tailor aid to local needs through local partners.

To address those challenges, the report recommends that donors fund anticipatory action at a rate of 1 percent in 2024, and increasing that share by 1 percent for the next 10 years, as well as making smarter investments, including helping farmers rapidly adapt to climate change, with a focus on regenerative agriculture; increasing the share of funding that goes to local organizations to 25 percent of donors’ total expenditure over the next five years; establishing UN country teams that unify funding and strategies that address humanitarian need, social and economic development, and peace; and launching a campaign to put under-utilized working solutions to the test in a real-time situation of food insecurity.

“We have the largest humanitarian appeals, the largest numbers of people who are food insecure, and the largest funding gaps in history,” said Carol Bellamy, author of the report and a former executive director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). “The numbers force new thinking about how we can both improve the effectiveness of existing aid and also reduce the need for aid through building more sustainable food systems.”

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