Goal 2: Zero Hunger

What Goal 2 asks for

Goal 2 covers four separate problems that are often collapsed into one word. The first is hunger itself: ensuring that everyone, and particularly poor people and infants, has access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food throughout the year, not just in a good harvest season. The second is malnutrition, which is not the same thing. A child can be fed enough calories and still be stunted, wasted or anaemic, so the goal sets separate commitments on stunting and wasting in children under five and on the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and breastfeeding women and older people.

The other half of the goal is about the people who grow the food. One target asks countries to double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, naming women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, and to do it through secure and equal access to land, inputs, knowledge, credit and markets. A companion target asks for food production systems that survive drought, flooding and extreme weather and that improve rather than exhaust soil, and another target deals with maintaining the genetic diversity of seeds and livestock through seed and plant banks. The final targets concern investment in rural infrastructure and agricultural research, and trade and commodity-market rules that distort what farmers can earn.

Goal 2 in India

India's approach to Goal 2 runs on two tracks: a food entitlement and a nutrition programme. The National Food Security Act, enacted on 5 July 2013, moved food security from welfare to a rights-based framework, legally entitling up to 75 per cent of the rural population and 50 per cent of the urban population to subsidised foodgrain through the Targeted Public Distribution System; the Act's own portal records a maximum coverage of about 81.34 crore persons. The Act takes a life-cycle approach, entitling children aged six months to fourteen years and pregnant and breastfeeding women to nutritious meals free of cost through Anganwadi centres and schools, and providing a cash maternity benefit of not less than Rs 6,000.

On the delivery side, PM POSHAN, formerly the mid-day meal programme, provides a hot cooked meal in government and government-aided schools and now extends to pre-school Balvatika children as well; its design includes school nutrition gardens, mandatory social audits in every district, locally decided menus that encourage millets and produce bought from farmer producer organisations and women's self-help groups, and extra provision for aspirational, tribal and high-malnutrition districts. Anganwadi services and supplementary nutrition sit under the Ministry of Women and Child Development. Non-profits in this space typically work on the parts that are hard to run from a state capital: community-level detection and management of severe acute malnutrition, counselling on infant and young child feeding, anaemia screening for adolescent girls, kitchen gardens and dietary diversity, and support to smallholder and tribal farmers on seed, soil and market access.