Food security requires improving the resilience of the agriculture and rural sectors against the impacts of:

• climate change and associated climate variability, and
• food price volatility.

Developing countries in Asia and the Pacific are likely to face the highest reductions in agricultural potential in the world due to climate change. As a result, climate change will place an additional burden on the region, which could undermine its efforts to meet long-term development goals.

At the same time, there has been a gradual rise in food prices since 2004. A return to a downtrend in world food prices, which was experienced between the mid-1970s and the first years of this century, seems unlikely.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change defines resilience as “the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb disturbances while retaining the same basic structure and ways of functioning, the capacity for self-organization, and the capacity to adapt to stress and change.”