Stories tagged: resilience

Planting the Roots of Peace: Humanitarian Heidi Kühn wins 2023 World Food Prize for restoring agriculture to de-mined land in former war zones

Heidi Kühn of the United States will receive the 2023 World Food Prize for her farmer-focused development model that revitalizes farmland, food security, livelihoods, and resilience after devastating conflict. For more than two decades, she has shown more than a million people living in war-torn regions around the world a way forward for restoring peace and prosperity through agriculture. Continue reading

Investment for Resilience in African Food Systems

Headshot of Apollos Nwafor

Dr Apollos Nwafor, AGRA’s Vice President for Policy and State Capability, outlines how food systems across Africa can better address malnutrition with increased resilience, investment and cross-sector collaboration. Continue reading

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

Moving Small-scale Farmers Up the Ladder of Protection and Possibility

Professor Michael R. Carter, founding director of the Resilience+ Innovation Facility, outlines how the Resilience+ framework can help smallholder farmers flourish through better risk management.

Life is constantly changing, and this is especially true for small-scale farmers. Ideally, a farming family’s livelihood will improve over time: they might grow a little more food to be able to sell locally, and then set aside whatever they can to protect themselves in the inevitable next disaster. 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