Presented by The Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University
Happy World Food Day’s eve, Dish readers. This year’s theme — “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future” — is all about collaboration to build more sustainable and equitable agrifood systems.
That theme landed neatly in Washington this week, where the World Bank announced a major new initiative: AgriConnect. The program operationalizes bank President Ajay Banga’s pledge last year to double the institution’s agribusiness investments to $9 billion per year by 2030. It’s expected to reach hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers in more than 20 countries — creating jobs, reducing poverty, and improving food security in the process.
And true to this year’s World Food Day slogan, collaboration is a key component of the initiative. The Inter-American Development Bank, African Development Bank, and International Fund for Agricultural Development were all named as partners, alongside private-sector players including Bayer.
“This initiative is extraordinary. It’s part of the collaboration of the MDBs — we have never collaborated like that before,” IDB President Ilan Goldfajn said at the event. The framework for that cooperation is still taking shape, but the goals are ambitious: Goldfajn said the IDB aims to reach and connect up to 60% of all farmers in Latin America and the Caribbean by 2030, while IFAD President Álvaro Lario pledged to reach 70 million small-scale farmers over the same period.
So what exactly is AgriConnect? As Banga put it: “What we have set out to do is first, help smallholders raise productivity and scale. Second, connect them to structured value chains that lift income. And third, guard against exploitation so farmers aren't forced to sell land for lack of credit, for lack of insurance, for lack of market access.”
Mobilizing private capital is one of the three core pillars of the program — alongside infrastructure investments such as irrigation and electrification, and policy reform, including the repurposing of agricultural subsidies.
Shobha Shetty, the World Bank’s global director for agriculture and food, told me the bank will use risk-sharing facilities, blended finance, and guarantee mechanisms through two of its institutions — the International Finance Corporation and Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency — to help de-risk investment in smallholder-linked value chains. The goal, she said, is to use limited public funds to leverage much larger flows of private finance into agribusiness and rural infrastructure.
One early sign of that partnership came yesterday, when Bayer signed a memorandum of understanding with the bank to expand local seed production, develop crop insurance products, and support smallholders’ shift from subsistence to more profitable farming. Bayer CEO Bill Anderson also said the company plans to bring new technologies to Africa, including nitrogen-fixing wheat — a crop designed to draw nitrogen from the air into the soil, reducing the need for fertilizer. “We’ve announced that we are going to forego our intellectual property for the continent of Africa on this technology,” he said.
For the bank, agriculture is increasingly being framed in terms of job creation. Its analysis suggests that every $1 million invested in agribusiness generates more jobs than an equivalent amount in manufacturing or services.
When I asked Wagner Albuquerque de Almeida, IFC’s director of global manufacturing, agribusiness and services, how the bank and IFC are dividing their efforts, he described the model as a kind of pyramid: large commercial farms at the top, subsistence producers at the bottom, and smallholders in the middle. “What we want to do is to join forces and try to meet in the middle,” he said.
A glimpse of what that might look like in practice is already emerging in Togo, where the bank approved a $300 million project in June to turn the country into a regional agribusiness hub. It’s expected to create around 72,000 jobs and reach more than 340,000 farmers.
As Shetty put it: “This is an example of what we plan to do and then scale in other countries and regions as well — really sort of combining the forces of the World Bank, IFC, and MIGA in a very systematic way.”
Read: Inside the World Bank’s plan to boost jobs by investing in agribusiness
Background: World Bank doubles agribusiness investment to $9B in strategy shift
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While the World Bank this week focused on boosting food production, a new report from the World Food Programme shows the other side of the food story: What happens when aid runs out.
In eastern Afghanistan, hunger is reshaping daily life. Children crowd into trucks bound for Jalalabad to look for work. Parents barter whatever they can. “Sadly, we’ve seen a rise in suicide calls from women to WFP’s hotline,” says John Aylieff, WFP’s country director for Afghanistan. “A woman called our hotline, telling us she could no longer see any way forward but to take her own life. Hunger was decimating her family.” He adds that as the situation worsened, “they'd sold their 12-year-old daughter into marriage with a 40-year-old man … known to have a drug addiction.”
Funding cuts have already forced WFP to close 298 nutrition sites across Afghanistan. The International Rescue Committee has shut 10 feeding programs, and Save the Children has closed 21 mobile health clinics. “In the last few months, with WFP, we’ve been turning away 9 out of 10 of the acutely hungry in the country,” Aylieff says, adding that the coming winter typically brings a spike in hunger.
The crisis extends far beyond Afghanistan. Globally, WFP’s budget has fallen by roughly 40% this year — from $9.8 billion to $6.4 billion — prompting cuts across multiple operations. The agency warns that up to 13.7 million people worldwide currently in IPC Phase 3 (“Crisis”) could slip into Phase 4 (“Emergency”), when excess mortality begins to appear.
The report, which focused on Afghanistan, Haiti, Niger, South Sudan, and Uganda, underscored how aid cuts are deepening hunger and weakening entire communities. Malnutrition leaves lasting physical and cognitive damage — particularly in small children — trapping communities in cycles of poor health and reduced productivity. As families turn to child marriage, child labor, and other desperate coping mechanisms, the social fabric frays — and years of investment in coordinated, cost-efficient humanitarian response risk being undone.
Jeanette Bailey of the International Rescue Committee says shrinking budgets are forcing agencies to step back from the community-based strategies that had been making aid more effective. “We have so many better strategies that would allow us to get ahead of things,” she says, “but now we’re being driven back toward only the most basic, lifesaving care.”
Read: ‘We’re turning away 9 out of 10 hungry people’ — the cost of shrinking aid
Bailey’s comments show what happens when budgets shrink: Even the most effective strategies fall away. But others say the problem runs deeper — that food aid systems themselves need to be rebuilt from the ground up.
In an opinion piece for Devex, Simon Winter, vice president for Reimagining Humanitarian Nutrition Security at The Rockefeller Foundation and executive director of the Sustainable Agriculture Foundations’ International Association in Basel, Switzerland, argues that the old model can’t simply be salvaged.
Instead, we need to create new systems that: 1) break down silos across food-related sectors; 2) improve how data is collected and used; and 3) change the prevailing narratives about aid.
Opinion: Our food aid systems are at breaking point. Time to build a better system
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Accra, Ghana
As Gazans return home after the latest ceasefire, the scale of destruction from two years of conflict with Israel is hard to fathom. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s infrastructure is damaged, the power grid has collapsed, and wastewater plants are offline. The last point is of particular concern given that Gaza’s soil is very porous, heightening the risk of sewage seeping into groundwater — which can have devastating health impacts, according to the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a research institution dedicated to advancing cross-border cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians.
Written before the ceasefire and officially released today, the findings of the report, “Shared Environments, Shared Futures: A Perspective on Nature-Based and Decentralized Solutions for Gaza’s Recovery,” feel particularly prescient.
Immediate priorities, the authors argue, should include restoring access to clean water through temporary storage tanks, decentralized desalination units, and solar-powered treatment systems. They also call for rapid clearance of debris and contamination to enable aid delivery.
In the medium term, the report envisions rebuilding around decentralized, community-led systems for water, sanitation, and renewable energy, supported by better data collection and early-warning systems to anticipate future shocks. For the longer term, it advocates for nature-based solutions — such as wetland restoration and regenerative agriculture — to underpin ecological recovery and create sustainable livelihoods, alongside governance reforms that embed transparency and local ownership in reconstruction efforts.
Background reading: ‘Nothing is left’ — the collapse of Gaza’s agricultural sector
See also: World Bank-IMF meetings reporters’ notebook entry on rebuilding Gaza — or redrawing it?
Trump’s global trade chaos creates an opportunity for African farmers. [Bloomberg]
The “food heroes” cultivating global change. [FAO]
Scoop: U.S. makes priorities known at Global Environment Facility talks. [Devex]
Update, Oct. 15, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect the official name of the initiative: AgriConnect.