Addressing Food Insecurity in Protracted Crises: What Has Been Learned

This brief provides an overview of lessons learned about food security in protracted crises, drawing on both interdisciplinary academic
research and reflections “from the field”. These insights provide a deeper understanding of threats to food security and actions that
can be taken to help individuals, groups (including households and communities) and systems (social, environmental, economic and
political) manage and resolve protracted crises. Governments are becoming more proactively assertive in developing and leading initiatives
to address the underlying causes of protracted crises and to address their tragic manifestations. There are increasingly sophisticated
understandings of how poor, marginalized and at risk populations manage risk and vulnerability. There is growing evidence
of the positive effects of peacebuilding on protracted crisis and of conflict-sensitive food-security programmes on peacebuilding. Encouraging
innovations in humanitarian and development practice include meaningful and strategic coordination, more effective
transitions within national and international humanitarian and development cooperation, and the development of a broader set of
interventions to address all aspects of food insecurity in protracted crises. Lessons have been learned about areas for improvement.
This includes a stronger focus on investing in agriculture in protracted crises, more effective strategies for protection of people and
their assets, the importance of humanitarian principles, and the challenges of supporting and rebuilding institutions eroded and
destroyed by protracted crises.