FAO - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Purpose

April 2022 - Global food insecurity is rising at an increasing rate, exacerbated by conflict, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Rigorous and reliable food security analysis is critical to ensuring humanitarian decision makers can deploy resources effectively. With GAC’s support, the Global Strategic Programme of the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) initiative, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aims to provide the humanitarian sector with the best possible food security analysis upon which to base their decisions, to help ensure needs-based policy and programming. Governments, United Nations agencies, non-governmental organizations, and civil society and humanitarian sector actors use the IPC’s classification and analytical approach to collaboratively determine the severity and magnitude of country-specific acute and chronic food insecurity and acute malnutrition. These determinations are made according to internationally-recognized scientific standards and using a level of analysis not available from other sources. The analysis provided by the IPC helps ensure that humanitarian programming targets the most vulnerable. Project activities include: (1) reinforcing the core capacity of the IPC program in providing rigorous, evidence and consensus-based analysis of food insecurity and acute malnutrition situations and improving the IPC quality and capacity in key priority countries, with a special focus on those facing the worst food crises as identified by the Global Report on Food Crises; (2) optimizing the early warning function of the IPC by improving the way IPC projections are developed and communicated and by providing frequent updates to inform early and timely action in countries of concern; (3) supporting the IPC’s training and certification of practitioners, building national capacity and technical support and expanding protocols; and (4) supporting improvements to the IPC’s information systems and contributing to food security and nutrition global reporting efforts.