ABSTRACT

The United Nations Decade for Nutrition was announced in 2016 with an important theme: policy convergence and coherence to ensure that government sectors and food system actors are working together towards achieving food security and improved nutrition worldwide. This chapter offers a more in-depth look at the importance of policy coherence for food security. It deals with a look at how policies articulate within countries, sub-regions, regions and global frameworks and why this presents so many challenges. Comprehensive food security policymaking is a relatively new endeavour for many governments. Food security information systems have tended to be fragmented and piecemeal, with over-emphasis on policy outcomes, and little understanding of processes, potential synergies or contradictions and impacts outside the scope of data collection. Supporting policy coherence for food security and nutrition requires wider awareness and agreement on key concepts, not least of all food security itself.