_GLOBAL FOOD INSECURITY OUTLOOK_ _3_ of April 2022, a database of macro-economic projections that is updated semiannually by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to reconstruct and project severe food insecurity from 2005 through 2027.<sup>1</sup> The resulting food insecurity outlook covers all 144 IDA and IBRD countries that together cover approximately 98% of global historical food insecure populations, and is internally consistent with the economic outlooks that serve as the input for the projections.

The results show that the 2021-2023 severely food insecure population may reach above 1 billion in the World Bank’s 144 IDA-eligible and IBRD countries, an increase of over 172 million people over the 2017-2019 pre-pandemic estimate. The projection exceeds the estimate of under 780 million for the 2008 World Food Price Crisis period and may remain above 1 billion through 2027 without large-scale targeted interventions. It is important to note that these results are a forecast of unmitigated impacts extrapolated from 2019 data. At the same time, the WEO outlook of April has not yet factored in the full effects of the Ukraine crisis. Due to the light-weight specification of the model, future results can easily be updated and revised based on new data. The framework can also utilize country specific growth projections available from other authorities and incorporate future relevant data streams that may become available.

Because finance is often unlocked contingent on some estimate of needs or projected response costs, the paper shows how the country level food insecurity estimates can be combined with response costs assumptions to assess temporal trends in development assistance needs. The different predictions work in tandem to decompose projected development assistance needs into the combined effects of changes in the prevalence of severe food insecurity, continued growth in the overall population, and changes in the per capita response costs. In the baseline forecast, the prevalence of severe food insecurity is projected to drop by about 0.5% points by 2025 from 2021-2023 highs, but the combined effect of continued population growth and elevated commodity prices would still lead to a doubling in development assistance needs compared to pre-pandemic baselines, calling for a sustained approach to investing in bettering the state of food security throughout the world.

The paper concludes that the proposed framework provides a robust and lowcost approach to maintain reliable projections and scenario analyses that can be interpreted within the context of available economic outlooks, contributing to the capacity to monitor global food insecurity trends and allowing both food security policies and economic policies to be informed by a cohesive set of expectations.

> The paper is structured as follows. Section I reviews related literature and discusses the background to this work. The objective is to better understand the use case that leads to the relatively narrow specification of the proposed

> 1The World Economic Outlook (WEO) is a comprehensive report with corresponding database published twice a year by the IMF and includes the IMF’s estimates and forecasts for global output growth and inflation as well as for real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, consumer prices, current account balances and unemployment in the fund’s 190 member countries. The data is drawn from IMF representatives’ consultations with member countries.