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Many Countries Unequipped For Food Price Volatility, Says WFP Head
During her keynote address at the 25th anniversary of the World Food Prize on October 13, WFP’s Executive Director Josette Sheeran said. "Most of the world is not placed to handle the volatility in food prices and supplies. 80 percent of people have no food safety net."
(Copyright: WFP/Rene McGuffin)
From the platform of the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa, WFP today highlighted the absence of food safety nets in many parts of the world, tell 1,400 participants that 80 percent of the world population lived without this sort of protection against phenomena such as food price volatility
DES MOINES - During her keynote address at the 25th anniversary of the World Food Prize today, WFP’s Executive Director Josette Sheeran placed the agency’s work within the context of global risk management to food security.
“Most of the world is not placed to handle the volatility in food prices and supplies. 80 percent of people have no food safety net”, Sheeran told the nearly 1,400 participants. “In any system that faces great risks, you invest 5 percent upfront to buy 90 percent security. At the back end you need manual override when all else fails.”
The same is true for food security. She emphasized the importance of WFP safety net programmes like school meals and food and cash for assets that will build resiliency when communities face moderate shocks while simultaneously stressing the need to continue to support life-saving programmes in emergencies like the drought crisis in the Horn of Africa.
“This is not the time to pull back support to the world’s most vulnerable,” she urged. “The vulnerabilities are too big. The discontinuities are too big. We have to do things differently and ask ourselves how we can look at the problems in a different way.”
According to Sheeran, changing the face of hunger requires innovation, technology, as well as radical collaboration. It also depends on the legendary passion of Norman Borlaug who has been called the father of the Green Revolution and created the World Food Prize in 1986 to recognize achievements in improving the availability of food in the world.
After showing a photo of a healthy 15 month old Somli boy who recovered from malnutrition after receiving a specialized nutritional food, Sheeran reminded the conference, “We can end malnutrition and hunger in this lifetime. It’s not about charity but creating jobs up the entire supply chain.”
This year the World Food Prize went to John Agyekum Kufuor and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for their personal commitment and visionary leadership while serving as the presidents of Ghana and of Brazil, respectively, in creating and implementing government policies to alleviate hunger and poverty in their countries.
