The devastating COVID-19 has already shaken the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development to its very core and, as it continues, the full effect on the progress towards the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is still to be determined.

The High-Level Political Forum noted that the world is “off track” to meeting theSDGs. The COVID-19 pandemic might have pushed an additional 83-132 million into chronic hunger in 2020.

Overall, progress remains insufficient in the food and agriculture domain, suggesting that the related SDG targets are beyond reach at a global level. The COVID-19 pandemic propelled world hunger in 2020, which increased from 8.4 to as much as 10.4 percent of the global population in just one year, after remaining virtually stagnant for five years.

While the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has been slowly rising globally since 2014, the increase in 2020 was equal to that of the previous five years combined.

Global water stress remains at a safe 18.4 percent according to 2018 estimates. This represents a 0.2 percent increase since 2015, with certain regions like Western and Northern Africa and Southern Asia registering an extremely high water stress level of over 70 percent. Meanwhile, water use efficiency rose by 10 percent across all economic sectors.

In 2021, FAO adopted a new Strategic Framework with SDGs 1, 2 and 10 as its core pillars. This report also discusses, for the first time, selected indicators for which FAO is a contributing agency and/or have key implications for food and agriculture across these Goals. These additional indicators provide valuable information on agricultural losses due to disasters, the distribution of land tenure rights, and the impact of international trade policies and regulations on agricultural trade, especially in developing and Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

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