Nepal: Zero Hunger Challenge National Action Plan (2016-2025).

The Nepal: Zero Hunger Challenge National Action Plan (2016-2025) is a cross-sectoral plan whose major objective is to ensure 'the right to food' by improving food and nutrition security of people to achieve a society free of hunger and malnutrition by 2025. It provides a situational analysis in terms of access to food, food availability, and food utilization and the key underlying causes for this situation. Further, it employs a twin-track approach by emphasizing both the emergency and long-term solutions to food and nutrition security.
To reach the goal of eliminating hunger and food insecurity, the policy lays down a long-term strategy for sustainable growth focused on enhanced food production and productivity, increased investment in agriculture, development of physical infrastructure, localization of food availability, development of agri-business, increase in employment opportunities while making agricultural occupations attractive for youths, support for smallholder and landless producers with access to productive resources, safety net support for vulnerable groups, and improved food governance. Agriculture will become more productive and sustainable through a series of actions including the promotion of climate smart crops which have comparative advantage in the food market, and actively engaging farm families in linking the transactions of valuable indigenous crops to the markets making the consumers aware about the nutritional properties contained in the indigenous sources of the staple food items.
Agriculture development will be supported in conjunction with actions aimed to reduce rural poverty such as the initiation of pro-poor policies for rural finance services, mobilization of cooperative funds to assist the smallholder and landless producers who form the majority of the farm households in the country, establishment of safety nets to support vulnerable groups, and increased efforts to generate rural employment opportunities and make agricultural occupation attractive for the youth.
In order to enable more inclusive and efficient agricultural and food systems special attention will be paid to the stimulation of agri-businesses with emphasis on related value chains, which can also be one of the ways of preserving food for a longer term to meet seasonal food shortage. In order to achieve zero loss or waste of food solutions focused on loss control at all levels, extending from production to consumption, will also be promoted. Special emphasis will be shown towards the establishment of sound infrastructural base (e.g. transport, cool and dry storage facilities, energy, preservation equipment, packing- house and ICT etc.) to manage loss at related supply points. In this regard, promoting knowledge management practices based on regular monitoring of implemented activities has been suggested.
Regarding governance, the NAP will attempt to obtain coordinated support from key stakeholders representing the service providers such government line agencies, cooperatives, farmers' groups, international development partners and the private sector stakeholders. The implementation process will prioritize activities in a sequenced manner by dividing the targets to be accomplished in the short-term (2016-2017), medium-term (2018-2020) and the long term (2021- 2025) time intervals. Progress will be monitored at both district and national levels through the ZHC Secretariat established at MoAD under the supervision of High Level Committee. The Secretariat will also be responsible for ensuring implementation of cross-sectoral tasks as planned under the NAP.