Can hunger be eradicated by 2030?

World hunger is growing at an alarming rate, with prolonged conflicts, climate change, and COVID-19 exacerbating the problem. In 2022, the World Food Programme helped a record 158 million people. On this trajectory, the United Nations' goal to eradicate hunger by 2030 appears increasingly unattainable. New research at McGill University shines the spotlight on a significant piece of the puzzle: international food assistance.

With no global treaty in place, food aid is guided by a patchwork of international agreements and institutions.

Using the concept of a "regime complex," a study published in the Journal of International Trade Law and Policy examines those rules and the systems that shape them. Rather than create a new entity to solve the problem, the findings point to a paradigm shift in the existing systems. Rethinking the dominant discourse among institutions is crucial to woworkingrk towards zero hunger, posits author Clarisse Delaville, a second-year doctoral student at McGill's Faculty of Law.

"There are two main regimes that govern global food assistance—the trade regime and the food security regime. I encourage a stronger commitment from both regimes to implement a human-rights-based approach in order to question the prominent discourse on food trade regimes, which paints food assistance as a distortion in a trade that ought to be minimized," says Delaville.