Project Syndicate: How to End Hunger
Hilal Elver, U.N. special rapporteur on the Right to Food and research professor of global studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, assistant director general and coordinator for economic and social development at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization

“…The only way to [eliminate hunger by 2030] will be to implement well-designed social protection and scale up pro-poor investments. … Improved social protection can help to ensure adequate food consumption and enable recipients to invest in their own nutrition, health, and other productive capacities. As such investments sustainably raise incomes, they enable further increases in productive personal investments, thereby breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and hunger. … Now, with the adoption of the [Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)], governments everywhere are obliged to take responsibility for ending poverty and hunger, as well as for creating the conditions for ensuring that both are permanently overcome. The upcoming High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development presents an important opportunity to forge the path ahead, setting near- and medium-term priorities. Ending hunger and poverty in a sustainable way is morally right, politically beneficial, and economically feasible. For world leaders, inaction is no longer an option” (7/8).