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United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2
End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Goal 2 joins two things that are often treated separately: whether people have enough to eat, and whether the systems producing that food can keep doing so. Its targets run from undernourishment and child stunting through to agricultural productivity, genetic diversity of seeds and livestock, and the trade rules that distort food markets.
It is one of the more demanding goals to satisfy, because progress on the nutrition targets can be bought at the expense of the sustainability ones. Intensification raises yields and lowers hunger while drawing down the water, soil and biodiversity that Goals 6 and 15 are trying to protect.
Verified work by charities on 4Planet, tagged to Goal 2.
Official UN wording. Serious reporting maps work to targets rather than goals — the code is what belongs in a disclosure. Numbered targets are outcomes; lettered targets are means of implementation.
By 2030, end hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round
Worth knowing before you cite a Goal 2 figure.
The headline prevalence of undernourishment is an estimate built from food-balance sheets and distribution assumptions, not a direct count of hungry people. It is revised backwards as inputs improve, so historic series change.
Stunting, wasting and overweight are measured from anthropometric surveys and capture something different from calorie adequacy. A country can improve on one and worsen on another simultaneously.
The productivity and sustainability targets rely on indicators whose methods are agreed but whose data most countries do not report on a regular cycle, so the sustainable-agriculture half of this goal is far less visible than the hunger half.
One target concerns food-price anomalies and market functioning, which move faster than annual statistical reporting. The indicator captures the direction but not the lived experience of a price spike.
Across all 17 goals, 35% of assessed targets are on track or making moderate progress and 18% have regressed. Source: The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2025, UN DESA.
No 4Planet writing carries this goal yet. Read the rest of the blog.
We link to the UN's own material rather than re-hosting it.
By 2030, end all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and wasting in children under 5 years of age, and address the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons
By 2030, double the agricultural productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, including through secure and equal access to land, other productive resources and inputs, knowledge, financial services, markets and opportunities for value addition and non-farm employment
By 2030, ensure sustainable food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, that help maintain ecosystems, that strengthen capacity for adaptation to climate change, extreme weather, drought, flooding and other disasters and that progressively improve land and soil quality
By 2020, maintain the genetic diversity of seeds, cultivated plants and farmed and domesticated animals and their related wild species, including through soundly managed and diversified seed and plant banks at the national, regional and international levels, and promote access to and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, as internationally agreed
Increase investment, including through enhanced international cooperation, in rural infrastructure, agricultural research and extension services, technology development and plant and livestock gene banks in order to enhance agricultural productive capacity in developing countries, in particular least developed countries
Correct and prevent trade restrictions and distortions in world agricultural markets, including through the parallel elimination of all forms of agricultural export subsidies and all export measures with equivalent effect, in accordance with the mandate of the Doha Development Round
Adopt measures to ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets and their derivatives and facilitate timely access to market information, including on food reserves, in order to help limit extreme food price volatility
