Agribusiness leaders are stepping up investment and technology to tackle world hunger and climate problems tied to agriculture, but they see no quick solution to hunger, which kills 25,000 people a day around the world.
“I’m not much of a magic bullet guy and I really do believe in a multiplicity of approaches,” Mark Cackler, who overseas rural poverty and agriculture programs for the World Bank, said in an interview at the World Food Prize forum on Friday.
“Each of us in our own way have the capacity, the potential and the duty to be leaders,” he said.
Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, confronted Cackler and others at the annual gathering of world food industry leaders at the forum with a challenge “in which the food sector of the world, which is the single largest sector of the world economy, is really at the heart of multiple intersecting crises.”
“While there is discussion on each of these issues, I don’t think we’re on a trajectory of solution right now,” Sachs said.
Sachs later said: “Pepsi or Monsanto or the big grain trading companies — I want them to come to the forefront and to the lead of solving some of these problems.”
“We cannot go on the way we’re going and we need the food industry to say it first and foremost because we can’t do this without the food industry’s leadership to solve the problems,” he said.
Cackler said many participants at the forum had been discussing Sachs’ critique and challenge.
“Jeff is absolutely right when he talks about the severity and the magnitude of the problem and how it’s insufficiently recognized. God bless him for reminding us fervently about how serious these problems are,” Cackler said.
“The fact that 25,000 people die every day of hunger and malnutrition, the fact over a billion go to bed hungry tonight is shameful,” Cackler said.
Cackler and executives at the three-day conference pointed out areas of progress such as increases in public and private investment in areas of Africa, which along with South Asia dominates world hunger concerns.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced US$120 million in grants to boost self-help efforts in agriculture in Africa and South Asia. Microsoft founder Gates told forum participants they must work together better.
BACKLASH: The National Party quit its decades-long partnership with the Liberal Party after their election loss to center-left Labor, which won a historic third term Australia’s National Party has split from its conservative coalition partner of more than 60 years, the Liberal Party, citing policy differences over renewable energy and after a resounding loss at a national election this month. “Its time to have a break,” Nationals leader David Littleproud told reporters yesterday. The split shows the pressure on Australia’s conservative parties after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor party won a historic second term in the May 3 election, powered by a voter backlash against US President Donald Trump’s policies. Under the long-standing partnership in state and federal politics, the Liberal and National coalition had shared power
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television