The 2012 Symposium on “Food and Nutrition Security Information: From valid measurement to effective decision making” brought together nearly 400 practitioners to discuss the latest trends, methodologies and progress made since the 2002 symposium. Its objectives were to: 1) report on progress made in the five methods originally reviewed in the 2002 symposium, with a special focus on FAO’s undernourishment estimates, the use of household income and expenditure data, and questionnaires for measuring people’s experience of food security and hunger; 2) report on innovations in new metrics, particularly in regard to changes in the global and country contexts cited above; and 3) move the discourse past information generation towards increasing the use of that information in decision making.