Attachments
Overview
With the WFP Executive Board’s approval in June 2022, WFP China’s new Country Strategic Plan (CSP) (2022-2025) became effective on July 1, 2022. Building upon the previous Country Strategic Plan (2017-2022), WFP’s cooperation with China under the new CSP will focus on one strategic outcome: improving nutrition status and livelihoods of left-behind groups in rural areas of China in line with national targets by 2025. WFP will continue to foster partnerships with the Government and public and private sectors on financial and technical support to WFP’s food security and nutrition targets. WFP China’s engagement in China under the new CSP from July to December 2022 is covered by this report.
WFP continued to support Chinese Government’s commitment to reducing malnutrition among children by implementing four pilot projects of preschool nutrition improvement program in 2022 in the rural areas of Hunan,
Gansu,Guangxi and Sichuan Province. These pilot projects aim to demonstrate the value of extending national school meals program to early childhood stage for nutrition improvement and rural human capital development. In the second half of 2022, with WFP’s support, approximately 5,600 (female 2,700, male 2,900) preschool children received 320,000 nutritious meals in 57 preschools.
In line with China’s rural revitalization strategy, WFP supported smallholder farmers in 2022 to increase their production capacity of nutritious and high-quality agricultural products and promote the establishment of the nutrition sensitive value chain to improve smallholder farmers’ nutritional status, increase their income, and enhance their resilience to climate change. WFP continued these endeavors through two pilot projects, namely the Zinc-enriched Potato Project in Gansu Province and the Holistic Agricultural Risk Management Project in Jilin Province. In the second half of 2022, approximately 7,500 (female 3.000, male 4,500) smallholder farmers benefited from these projects.
WFP strengthened the partnership with government agencies in China and continued obtaining their support to other developing countries to achieve food security and nutrition improvement through increased food assistance projects.
WFP’s partnership with the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA) is further strengthened on food assistance responding to emergencies across the world. WFP also succeeded in mobilizing contributions from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (MARA) for a wide range of recipients with scaling up the funding support to both South South & Triangular Cooperation and China CSP. MARA also opened new dedicated support to WFP’s School Based Programmes and maintained its firm commitment to flexible Immediate Response Account which has been playing crucial role supporting WFP’s rapid response to food crisis.
WFP continued to explore the opportunities of developing potential partnerships and strengthening the existing partnerships with private sector, charitable foundations, and online fundraising platforms. In 2022, WFP kept working closely with our private sector partners including Teck Resources, Cargill, General Mills, Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, etc. while exploring new partnership with leading Chinese companies to leverage more resources in support of WFP’s programs. The Letter of Intent was signed with Cainiao, the logistic arm of Chinese tech giant, Alibaba to leverage its strengths in logistic solutions to help WFP achieve Zero Hunger by 2030. USD 600,000 was donated by Gates Foundation to support rice value chain development in Guinea and Côte d'lvoire through South-South and Triangular Cooperation (SSTC) with China. WFP also explored innovative collaboration opportunities with charitable foundations in China to leverage their big base of private partners as well as High-Net-Worth Individual (HNWI) in contributing to WFP’s programs. WFP China has been exploiting the potential of individual giving in China. In 2022, through WFP’s fundraising pages on Tencent platform, approximately USD 1 million were raised to support WFP’s preschool nutrition programmes in China, Laos, and Cambodia. With the continuous increase of individual giving over the last there years, WFP is developing its individual giving strategy in China for the next three years, to better position ourselves and properly leverage our resources in China, to gain more support from the public and increase WFP’s visibility.
China continued to make important steps towards the achievement of SDG 2, producing more than 686 million tons of grains and improving the food security of its population in 2022.However, China still faces multiple challenges in food security and prevention of a mass return to poverty in rural China. First,smallholder farmers, who produce about 80 percent of the food in China and among whom 60 percent are women, are still among the most vulnerable groups due to their modest income, the limited access to technology and financial support, insufficient ability to connect with large markets and lacking the empowerment and capacity to cope with risks. Second, there are growing environmental constraints on agricultural production. Climate change has begun to significantly impact agriculture development and farmers’ livelihood. Third, the income gap between rural and urban households is still large. The annual per capita disposable income of rural households in China was approximately USD 2,718, roughly 40 percent of the income of urban households. The Government of China called for continuous comprehensive promotion of rural revitalization to ensure stable and increasing agricultural production, growing incomes for farmers and improving rural ecological environment, through the issuing of key policies.
Nutrition among the Chinese population continued to improve, with child wasting and stunting under control. The prevalence of stunting dropped to 4.8 percent (boys 5.4, girls 4.2) and wasting remained below 2.0 percent (boys 2.0, girls 2.0) among young children under six years old. Average life expectancy reached 78.2 years in 2021 which is up from 77.93 years in 2020, with women's average life expectancy exceeding 80 years. However, China’s populations are facing the challenge of the coexistence of overweight/obesity and micronutrient deficiency due to unbalanced dietary structure and insufficient nutrient intake which are particularly worse for low -income rural population. 34.3 percent of Chinese residents above eighteen years old (urban 34.4, rural 34.2) are overweight, and 16.4 percent(urban 17.5, rural 15.3) are obese, and the overweight and obesity rates of children under 6 have reached 6.8 percent (boys 8.0, girls 5.4) and 3.6 percent (boys 4.2, girls 2.7) respectively. More than 50 percent of rural residents' nutrients intake did not meet the diet standard and unbalanced diet induces a variety of nutrition-related chronic diseases. The Chinese National Nutrition Plan of Action (2017-2030) highlights the urgency to act by 2030 to further decrease the prevalence rate of anemia to <10 percent in key populations, encompassing children under the age of five and pregnant women; further narrow the difference in height between urban and rural students; effectively control the rising trend of student obesity; increase the penetration rate of nutrition knowledge by 10 percent on the basis of 2020; slow down significantly residents’ growing prevalence of overweight and obesity.
China continues to play an increasingly influential role as a development actor and provider of international development cooperation. China aims to further strengthen international cooperation and South-South cooperation with a focus on post-pandemic recovery, and expand cooperation in such areas as public health, climate change, biological diversity, and agriculture.
In China, WFP continued to support China’s rural revitalization and global food security improvement in line with the Government’s Fourteenth Five-year Plan, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the United Nations Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework for China for 2021-2025 in 2022. WFP worked closely with the Chinese government to reduce the malnutrition rates among children in targeted underdeveloped rural areas by extending national nutrition programmes to remote rural communities and implement nutrition-sensitive programmes more effectively. WFP endeavored to enhance the livelihoods and resilience of smallholder farmers by promoting climate-resilient, sustainable, and nutrition-sensitive food systems, establishing more efficient, inclusive, and safer food value chains and building resilience against shocks and stress for enhanced food and nutrition security. Given China's increasing role for international development cooperation, WFP strengthened partnership with the Chinese government and private sector to extend technical and financial support to other developing countries in their efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 2 on Zero Hunger.
Risk Management
China experienced a sporadic resurgence of COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 which has posed great challenges for WFP China Office in its endeavors to keep the projects on track and achieve the expected progress in 2022. Targeted measures were taken to withstand the impacts of COVID-19 and ensure all stakeholders stay motivated through hybrid modes of project management, effective communication through diverse communication platforms, staying proactive and creating contingency plans to mitigate the potential risk of lockdowns. The unprecedented challenges COVID-19 brought to the Chinese economy posed potential risks to the funding resources of the CSP in 2022.Funding shortfalls have been mitigated through proactive engagement with the public and private sector partners.