The Covid-19 pandemic has made hunger worse: the number of people without access to adequate food in 2020 was 2.37 billion – up 320 million in a year. The prevalence of undernourishment – a measure of how much of the world suffers from an acute form of food deprivation – increased by 1.5 per cent to nearly 10 per cent. In 2015, international leaders committed to ending poverty and hunger. But at current rates, the number of malnourished people in 2030 won’t be zero, it will be 660 million.1
In a bid to reverse these trends, members of the World Economic Forum, the Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations, government officials and policy experts around the world will attend a Food Systems Summit under the aegis of the United Nations in New York this September. It will be led by Agnes Kalibata, who was the Minister for Agriculture in the East African country of Rwanda between 2008 and 2014. During that time, she oversaw an incredible 300-per-cent increase in maize production, spurred by Rwanda’s participation in the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), a billion-dollar initiative largely funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which aimed to bring high-yield agricultural practices to 30 million smallholder farming households.
