The UN has three agencies that work to promote food security and agricultural development: the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). FAO is the worlds agricultural knowledge agency, providing policy and technical assistance to developing countries to promote food security, nutrition and sustainable agricultural production, particularly in rural areas. WFPs key mission is to deliver food into the hands of the hungry poor. The agency steps in during emergencies and uses food to aid recovery after emergencies. Its longer term approaches to hunger helps the transition from recovery to development. IFAD, with its knowledge of rural poverty and exclusive focus on poor rural people, designs and implements programmes to help those people access the assets, services and opportunities they need to overcome poverty.Following successful post WWII reconstruction of Germany and Japan, the IMF and WB began to turn their attention to the developing world. A great many civil society actors were also active in trying to combat hunger, especially after the late 1970s when global media began to bring the plight of starving people in places like Ethiopia to wider attention. Most significant of all, especially in the late 1960s and 70s, the Green revolution helped improved agricultural technology propagate throughout the world.The United States began to change its approach to the problem of world hunger from about the mid 1950s.
At the Summit, which took place at LAquila in central Italy, the LAquila Food Security Initiative was launched, with a total of US$22 billion committed to combat hunger.Food prices fell sharply in 2009 and early 2010, though analysts credit this much more to farmers increasing production in response to the 2008 spike in prices, than to the fruits of enhanced government action. However, since the 2009 G8 summit, the fight against hunger became a high-profile issue among the leaders of the worlds major nations and was a prominent part of the agenda for the 2012 G-20 summit.In April 2012, the Food Assistance Convention was signed, the worlds first legally binding international agreement on food aid. The May 2012 Copenhagen Consensus recommended that efforts to combat hunger and malnutrition should be the first priority for politicians and private sector philanthropists looking to maximize the effectiveness of aid spending. They put this ahead of other priorities, like the fight against malaria and AIDS. Also in May 2012, U.S. President Barack Obama launched a "new alliance for food security and nutrition"—a broad partnership between private sector, governmental and civil society actors—that aimed to "...achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years." The UKs prime minister David Cameron held a hunger summit on 12 August, the last day of the 2012 Summer Olympics.The fight against hunger has also been joined by an increased number of regular people.