The world is off track to meet its own deadline for ending hunger. For the first time in many years, the estimated number of undernourished people has actually gone up rather than down. It now stands at slightly more than 800 million undernourished people worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.

Hunger remains a universal problem. A Gallup poll taken over the past decade, asking respondents whether there have been times in the past 12 months when they didn’t have enough money to buy food showed that in low-income countries, the share has gradually increased to around 60 percent. In middle-income countries, it’s stuck around 30 percent. Even in advanced economies, it’s quite high, somewhere near 10 percent.

If we focus on the problems in the poorest countries, the issues start with low levels of productivity in rural areas. In a wide range of countries, total spending on food and nutrition security is less than $10 per person per year. At that level, reductions in hunger are unlikely. Another contributing factor is food prices.  Internationally, food prices have started to come down from their peak, which seems to lead to declining donor commitments to food and nutrition security. When it comes to official development assistance, the last major commitments were made at the 2009 G-8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, which mostly expired in 2012.

There is still a massive global problem, and it’s getting worse. Policies aren’t changing much, and resources are flat. So what can be done?

Read the full article about ending hunger by Homi Kharas and John McArthur by Brookings.