No more business as usual for food security and nutrition: our shared responsibility

On 11 August, Gerda Verburg, Chair of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and Chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Food and Nutrition Security, made a Keynote Address to the Crawford Fund conference in Australia.

In this presentation, she considered that to produce 70% more food by 2050 to feed the expected 9 billion people, it can’t be business as usual. We simply don’t have the energy or water to sustain such an increase. A world without hunger is within our reach if we are smarter in the way that we use the resources, tools, and technology available to us, and if we are willing to move away from working in silos and embrace a crosscutting and multistakeholder approach. There is growing global attention/recognition on the need to transform agriculture and food systems. The way to do this means that each and every stakeholder must play their role and at the same time open up to collaboration with other stakeholders – from big companies, to family farmers, advocacy organizations, research institutions etc. She considered that the CFS and the World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture, are leading the charge on this transformation by bringing together governments, private sector actors, civil society representatives, leading research organizations, financing institutions and many others in order to contribute to the birth of a diversity ofsolutions to feed the 1 billion people still living in extreme poverty and the 2 billion suffering from malnutrition. Now more than ever, as we are set to agree on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), exploring how we can intensify our existing collaboration and expand the opportunities to build on each other’s strengths is necessary if we are to be successful at bridging the projected annual investment deficit of USD2.5 trillion. Addressing food security and nutrition has at times been a minefield of polarizing debates, when in fact the best solutions are often found when we can combine and build on ideas and options from across the spectrum. Not shying away from addressing contentious issues in a multi stakeholder dialogue, like - the role of genetic engineering, or the role for smallholders in intensification, how to optimize land use, or how we can combine traditional knowledge with innovation and technology - is the only way to build consensus and truly create food systems, where sustainability and profitability are inextricably linked. The full text of the speech is available here.