The hunger reduction challenge requires an integrated approach to address immediate and underlying causes of food and nutrition insecurity. In particular, there is a clear call for actions and accountability to accelerate the world’s progress on chronic food insecurity and malnutrition. The Global Nutrition Report (2014) acknowledges that there is a lot of available information on nutrition, but it also points out that such information is too fragmented and there are critical gaps to be filled. Furthermore, the 2014 State of Food Insecurity in the World Report highlights that an important lesson learned drawn from countries experiences is that food insecurity and malnutrition are complex inter-related problems that cannot be resolved by a single stakeholder or sector.

In this context, the European Commission (EC) and FAO are working together to help meet these challenges. The IPC initiative, through FAO, greatly benefits from EC support. According to Gianpietro De Cao, DG DEVCO Programme Officer, “IPC is the best existing tool for analysing food and nutrition security. This is why the EC is investing in its development 10 million Euros through the INFORMED program, funded under the Global Public Goods and Challenges  thematic programme”.

The EU is placing resilience as a central objective of development and humanitarian assistance. “Resilience building among vulnerable communities will be pursued by tackling root causes of food insecurity and malnutrition. EC will address this commitment both in the geographical and thematic programmes” Mr. De Cao says. “In particular, the Pro-resilience Action (PRO-ACT) initiative is a crucial component of the EC Annual Action Programme for Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture”. Such initiative aims at addressing food insecurity in countries in post-crisis situation and at supporting vulnerable populations to become more resilient, thereby linking relief rehabilitation and development.

In this context, “the exercise of identifying and selecting countries in need and allocating funds is annual and sequential: it is based on a technical analysis of the food security situation, completed by an assessment of EU response capacity. The criteria are: evidence-based needs assessment, nature of food and nutrition crisis, capacity and complementarities assessment. The evidence-based needs assessment is conducted through the Cadre Harmonisé for West Africa and the IPC for the rest of the world. Therefore IPC is playing an important role in DEVCO decision processes”.

According to Mr. De Cao, one of the major challenges that the IPC partnership needs to face is the measurement of the effectiveness of IPC tools in relation with changes in Government approaches and responses. “While IPC was initially conceived for orienting the emergency responses, mainly externally driven, we have now a more comprehensive tool which could be used for policies design too”. Talking about the future of IPC, Mr. De Cao adds that “a tool that allows comparison of different IPC analyses would help us for different reasons: we would be able to evaluate the development of IPC, how it has gradually improved and, most important, it would allow us to challenge Governments about the responses. If an area is considered vulnerable in different consecutive analyses, then there is no reason for calling it an emergency, continuing to rely on external aid. That area must become a priority for Government’s intervention. In this sense, IPC would become a major advocacy tool. This is even more valid for the chronic vulnerability, for example in the drought prone regions, like Sahel and Horn of Africa”.

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