Ro(a)ming

In mid-February I went to Rome to report from the Governing Council of the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD). We were hit with worrisome statistics: it will cost $30 billion a year to feed the world’s hungry – money that hasn’t been committed to be spend by anyone.

Climate change – droughts, floods, change in rainfall patterns – will worsen food insecurity around the world even further. The countries that will be most affected are, of course, in the global South (while climate change is mostly caused by the North). More than 20 million children suffer from malnutrition, and more than 50 million people lack access to water, to mention just a few consequences.

Ironically, those who suffer from hunger most are the ones who produce most of the world’s food – smallholder farmers. This is because investment in agriculture has gone down over the past two decades. As a result, we are far from meeting the first Millennium Development Goal that aims to halve hunger and poverty by 2015.

Even if we start doing something about climate change and hunger right now, we’ll have to live with the effects of it for the next 30 years, one expert said. When will the international organisations, like World Bank, and governments wake up and set long-term goals instead of chasing short-term profits?