There were also more frequent calls for large scale intervention against world hunger from academics and politicians, such as U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Funded both by the government and private donations, the U.S. was able to dispatch millions of tons of food aid to European countries during and in the years immediately after WWI, organized by agencies such as the American Relief Administration. Hunger as an academic and social topic came to further prominence in the U.S. thanks to mass media coverage of the issue as a domestic problem during the Great Depression. Efforts after World War II
While there had been increasing attention to hunger relief from the late 19th century, Dr David Grigg has summarised that prior to the end of World War II, world hunger still received relatively little academic or political attention; whereas after 1945 there was an explosion of interest in the topic.After World War II, a new international politico-economic order came into being, which was later described as Embedded liberalism. For at least the first decade after the war, the United States, then by far the periods most dominant national actor, was strongly supportive of efforts to tackle world hunger and to promote international development. It heavily funded the United Nations development programmes, and later the efforts of other multilateral organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).The newly established United Nations became a leading player in co-ordinating the global fight against hunger.
$4.15 billion of new commitments were made to tackle hunger at a June 2013 Hunger Summit held in London, hosted by the governments of Britain and Brazil, together with The Childrens Investment Fund Foundation.Despite the hardship caused by the 2007–2009 financial crisis and global increases in food prices that occurred around the same time, the UNs global statistics show it was followed by close to year on year reductions in the numbers suffering from hunger around the world. By 2019 however, evidence had mounted that this progress seemed to have gone into reverse over the last four years. The numbers suffering from hunger had risen both in absolute terms and very slightly even as a percentage of the worlds population.In 2019, FAO its annual edition of The State of Food and Agriculture which asserted that food loss and waste has potential effects on food security and nutrition through changes in the four dimensions of food security: food availability, access, utilization and stability. However, the links between food loss and waste reduction and food security are complex, and positive outcomes are not always certain. Reaching acceptable levels of food security and nutrition inevitably implies certain levels of food loss and waste. Maintaining buffers to ensure food stability requires a certain amount of food to be lost or wasted. At the same time, ensuring food safety involves discarding unsafe food, which then is counted as lost or wasted, while higher-quality diets tend to include more highly perishable foods.