Sustainable Livelihoods
Higher temperatures, erratic rainfall and increasing uncertainty pose significant challenges for food systems and small-scale food producers, eroding confidence in local knowledge of weather patterns and ecosystem services. Rising food and nutrition insecurity in the face of the climate emergency is a defining challenge of the 21st century. Food security encompasses the availability of food, access to nutritious food, stability of food supply, and good care, feeding, health and sanitation practices, and it conveys having consistent and affordable access to enough of the right kinds of food.
As farmers, caregivers and producers, women play a key role in feeding the world. Yet, they have unequal access to resources, services and assets to increase their yields, incomes, and resilience. Thus, CARE’s 2020 Strategy and its global framework for food and nutrition security, She Feeds the World, seek to work with women, girls, men and boys to free women’s potential. CARE recognizes gender inequalities and climate change as major contributors to rising food and nutrition insecurity, which exacerbates poverty, vulnerability, and injustice.
In its food and nutrition security work, CARE aims to strengthen climate-resilient small-scale agriculture systems to improve food and nutrition security for producers, workers and consumers. CARE works to build food and agriculture systems that are Sustainable, Productive and Profitable, Equitable and Resilient (SuPER). SuPER is a set of principles that guides CARE’s work in small-scale agriculture in a changing climate and articulates the outcomes that agriculture and food systems must deliver to work for small-scale food producers.
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Cultivating Equality
This report demonstrates how inequality determines who eats first and who eats worst, and how this shapes people’s ability to adapt to climate change. The report argues that solutions around food production are not enough, and demands more dialogue and action to address inequality in food systems.
Ensuring Sustainability
In this report, CARE contributes further to the global ongoing debate on sustainability in food security and nutrition, and shares some of the lessons learned out of our programs in order to, together with our partners, peer NGOs and the development community at large, continue pursuing a world where equality and justice prevail over hunger and poverty.
She Feeds the World
CARE’s Programmatic Framework for Food and Nutrition Security, She Feeds the World, helps the more than 800 million people who go to bed hungry—not because the world does not produce enough food, but because of global injustice. Hunger and malnutrition are the greatest threats to public health, killing more people than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined (UN HLTF, 2008). They are caused by complex inter-related factors, meaning that narrow sectoral strategies will not solve the problem. Social norms that don’t value women, market systems that do not reach poor people, climate change threatening productivity, and policies that fail the poorest and most vulnerable people are the causes of hunger and malnutrition around the world. She Feeds the World (SFtW) brings together the best of CARE and our partners’ approaches into an integrated framework to solve these problems, and helps us work with others to scale them up to reach more people. It helps us get solutions to more people in need, faster and more sustainably.
SuPER Food: CARE’s Principles for Food and Nutrition Security
In 2014, CARE reached nearly 14 million people with food and nutrition security programs, and we have committed helping 50 million poor and vulnerable people improve their food and nutrition security and their resilience to climate change by 2020. How are we going to get there? By working toward SuPER food systems: food systems that are Sustainable, Productive (including Profitable and Nutritious), Equitable, and Resilient. All of CARE’s work in food and nutrition security promotes the right and ability of the poorest and most vulnerable to have the same access to nutritious foods and fair markets as everyone else.