For the third consecutive year, South America slid backwards in the global struggle to achieve zero hunger by 2030, with 39 million people living with hunger and five million children suffering from malnutrition.
With malnutrition continuing to afflict one in nine people globally, the UN has appointed 29 global leaders to help tackle the problem head on.
While Latin America keeps expanding its agricultural frontier by converting large areas of forest, one country, Costa Rica, has taken a different path and is now a role model for a peaceful coexistence between food production and sustainable forestry.
Lawmakers in the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean decided at a regional meeting to work as a bloc for the passage of laws on food security – an area in which countries in the region have show uneven progress.
Latin America and the Caribbean, the world’s most unequal region, has made the greatest progress towards improving food security and has become the region with the largest number of countries to have reached the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people.
Sub-Saharan Africa may be home to six of the world's 10-fastest growing economies, but it also has a majority of the countries that are suffering from a food crisis.
As the United Nations prepares to launch an ambitious post-2015 development agenda, the message from one of its Rome-based agencies is unequivocal: the eradication of hunger and malnutrition should remain a high priority when the current Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) end in 2015.
Author Malcolm Gladwell draws on the science of epidemiology in his book "The Tipping Point" to explain how ideas spread through a population, in the same way as an infectious disease can proceed from a few cases to a full-blown pandemic.
Providing school meals for 45 million children is a remarkable achievement for Brazil. But the programme faces specific difficulties, as well as the generic problems plaguing any national plan in this vast country of more than 192 million people.
"I heard about the Zero Hunger plan on television, but unfortunately it has not arrived here," complained Elías Ruíz, a small farmer in the southern community of Santa Odilia, about the Guatemalan government's flagship programme to end poverty.
The Brazilian government is stepping up South-South aid, to strengthen the South American giant’s status as a donor country and its international clout. It now provides assistance to 65 countries, and its financial aid has grown threefold in the last seven years.
The man who played a key role in the design of Brazil's successful food security policies believes it is possible to eradicate hunger in the world, and intends to try by promoting "a simple idea."