Global Hunger Index 2020 – CivilsNotebook

Context:

According to the Global Hunger Index 2020, India has the highest prevalence of wasted children under five years in the world.

Key findings:

India ranks 94 out of 107 countries in the Index, lower than her neighbors such asBangladesh (75) and Pakistan (88).
In the region of the south, east, and south-eastern Asia, the only countries which fare worse than India are Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, and North Korea.
- Child stunting: Although it is still in the poorest category, however, child stunting has actually improved significantly, from 54% in 2000 to less than 35% now.
- Child wasting: It has not improved in the last two decades, and is rather worse than it was a decade ago.
- Child mortality rates: India has improved in both child mortality rates, which are now at 3.7%, and in terms of undernourishment, with about 14% of the total population which gets an insufficient caloric intake.

The worldwide scenario of food security:

Worldwide nearly 690 million people are undernourished which warns that the COVID-19 pandemic could have affected the progress made on reducing hunger and poverty.

SDG Goals progress:

The 2020 Global Hunger Index report presents a multi-dimensional measure of national, regional, and global hunger by assigning a numerical score based on several aspects of hunger.
- It then ranks countries by GHI score and compares current scores with past results.
The 2020 report considers a One Health approach to linking health and sustainable food systems in order to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.
The world is also not on track to achieve the second Sustainable Development Goal — known as Zero Hunger for short — by 2030.
At the current pace, nearly 37 countries will fail even to reach low hunger, as defined by the Global Hunger Index Severity Scale, by 2030

It is a tool that measures and tracks hunger globally as well as by region and by country.
It is calculated annually, and its report issued in October each year.
The GHI was initially published by the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Germany-based Welthungerhilfe.
In 2007, the Irish NGO Concern Worldwide also became a co-publisher

Calculation of GHI Scores:

The Global Hunger Index measures hunger on a 100-point scale, with 0 being the best score (no hunger) and 100 being the worst.
The GHI combines 4 component indicators:
- the proportion of the undernourished as a percentage of the population;
- the proportion of children under the age of five suffering from wasting, a sign of acute undernutrition;
- the proportion of children under the age of five suffering from stunting, a sign of chronic undernutrition; and
- the mortality rate of children under the age of five.