News | Partnership with UNICEF Delivers the Goods
Our impact

Bolstering Food Security

Our work helps countries to maintain food supply by creating well functioning trade systems
Trade Facilitation and Food Security

Making the Link

Ensuring access to safe, nutritious, and affordable food to meet dietary needs should never be a pressing concern. Yet today, one in ten people around the world is experiencing hunger, an estimated nine million people die from starvation every year, and almost one-third of the global population – 2.3 billion people – endure food insecurity.

Growing more food is only one part of the journey from farm to fork – trade facilitation plays a vital role in ensuring that highly perishable goods make it to market in optimal condition. Reducing the time and cost of trade can mitigate deterioration and spoilage, while greater access to global markets may also encourage the transition from subsistence
farming to surplus production.

Trade facilitation makes trade work better by simplifying border processes. Excessive tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and complex customs procedures impede the flow of food products across borders, affecting availability, affordability, and discouraging production.

This is why policymakers must consider trade facilitation as part of their food security strategy.

Spoilage

Digitalising paper-based procedures helps eliminate unnecessary delays, allowing fresh food to transit faster.

Productivity

Fewer hold-ups on imported inputs such as fertilisers stimulate agricultural production.

Transparency

Seamless systems provide predictability for agri-food traders, improving confidence in cross-border transactions.
What We Do

How the Alliance Can Help

The Alliance’s public-private partnership approach has a proven, reliable track record of  bolstering food security, generating measurable impacts that are making a real difference to countries, businesses, and
consumers.

Digitalisation, the lifeblood of Alliance projects, has helped transform the agri-food trading environment for many developing countries.

Making trade more inclusive by reducing time and cost can also contribute to food security in many ways, including by strengthening plant health protection and consumer safety.