Stories tagged: covid19

How Nutrition-Smart Agriculture Can Help Build Resilience Against the “Three C” Crises of Climate, Conflict and COVID-19

Arun Baral, CEO of HarvestPlus – CGIAR’s flagship programme on staple crop biofortification – discusses how biofortification can help bolster food systems resilience in the face of global crises.

We hear a growing chorus of warnings from members of the food and nutrition security community about the dire consequences of the war in Ukraine on global rates of hunger and malnutrition. Arif Husain, chief economist at the World Food Programme, noted recently that threats in numerous countries to food production and availability from the “Three C’s” — climate, conflict, and COVID-19 — are rapidly being compounded by the “Three F’s” — spiking food, fuel, and fertiliser prices. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the number of undernourished people worldwide could increase by 8 to 13 million this year alone. Continue reading →

Helping Food Systems Recover from COVID-19: Where Do We Go from Here?

Kindra Halvorson, Chief Transformation Officer, TechnoServe, reflects on the previous year to identify key learnings to help food systems recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

A year and a half since COVID-19 was first declared a pandemic, nearly every aspect of our world has been impacted and disrupted. Food systems are no exception. According to the FAO’s State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2021, the pandemic pushed an additional 118 million people into hunger during 2020, representing the first time in more than a decade that the number of people facing hunger increased significantly. Continue reading →