Devex Dish: Global food security program makes climate focus official

Those of you who tuned into our Seat at the Table event last month (catch up here if you weren’t able to join us live) heard Kathryn Hollifield preview the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program’s steering committee meeting. This week Hollifield, who is program manager of GAFSP, shared with me the news that it has taken the decision to explicitly focus its programs on climate.

Many GAFSP projects already had climate elements, Hollified told me, but this is the first time the program — which was created after the 2007-08 food price crisis and focuses on building long-term resilience in agriculture and food systems in low-income countries — will require it. The move was driven by smallholder farmers, who are seeing the ill effects of climate change on their production and livelihoods.

“It changes every single step and every definition of the program,” Hollifield said. “It really is making sure that existing and future projects are aligned with and are helping to build the national climate plans and these are being integrated with the wider climate principles and the different commitments in the global fora that are out there.”

The news will certainly be welcomed among many who seek to strengthen the ties between the food system and agricultural communities after the U.N. Food Systems Summit. Many people I’ve talked to not only want the coordination to continue into the 2022 U.N. Climate Change Conference and beyond, but say it is absolutely vital if either the food systems transformation or climate change agenda are to succeed.

+ How would you like to see the food systems and climate communities work better together? Share your thoughts with me at dish@devex.com.

Read: Global food security program makes climate focus official (Pro)

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Winner winner sustainable dinner

The most anticipated award announcement in our food security world took place last week: Cynthia Rosenzweig is the 2022 World Food Prize laureate for her work modeling the impact of climate change on global food production. Rosenzweig, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was one of the first scientists to study the impact climate change would have on the food supply in the 1980s and founded the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project, which has helped more than 90 countries build resilience to climate change.

“For a long time all the studies focused on agricultural production. How would climate change affect farmers’ fields and growing of crops worldwide? But now, in really the last five years or so, the food system approach has really come to the fore,” Rosenzweig told me when I had the chance to speak with her before the official announcement was made.

Read: Climate scientist wins 2022 World Food Prize

Fowler play

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has appointed Cary Fowler as special envoy for global food security. It’s the first time the role will be filled since 2016, and Fowler will help manage the U.S. response to the growing food price crisis as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Fowler helped found the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — the arctic facility that safeguards hundreds of thousands of seed varieties — which Dish readers are familiar with. According to his website, Fowler lives on a small farm in New York where he grows apples and has cattle, chickens, and ducks.

Focus on the food crisis

The U.S. holds the U.N. Security Council presidency this month, and Thomas-Greenfield says it will focus attention on the global food crisis. Blinken will chair a global food security call to action ministerial meeting on May 18, and the U.S. will convene a General Assembly debate on the intersection of conflict and food security May 19 in New York. The U.N. Security Council will consider what it can do to prevent new conflicts caused by rising food insecurity, and Thomas-Greenfield calls the U.N. “the right venue for such a meeting.”

Meanwhile, USAID Administrator Samantha Power has been on the national news circuit the past few weeks talking about rising food prices and what the agency is doing to alleviate the worst outcomes. The Republican National Committee did not appreciate her implication that the spike in fertilizer prices could move farmers toward organic inputs:

+ Devex Pro subscribers can also read about World Bank economists’ recommendation to invest in new agricultural technologies such as ways to use fertilizers more efficiently to lower food costs.

Cash flow

My colleague Adva Saldinger reports that the International Finance Corporation will launch two new financing facilities to keep money flowing into Ukraine and its neighboring countries — and to address the growing food crisis triggered by the Russian invasion.

A new fast-track facility will support projects in Ukraine and surrounding countries, while a second facility is a global food security platform that will support commodity traders, farmers, food processors, and fertilizer-related businesses.

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Number munching

That’s the number of people facing catastrophe levels of acute food insecurity, characterized by starvation and death, across Ethiopia, South Sudan, southern Madagascar, and Yemen — four times more than in 2020. We brought you the highlights from the 2022 Global Report on Food Crises last week just as the report became public, but I want to be sure you see my colleague Rumbi Chakamba’s full rundown.

Recap: Hunger reached record high in 2021, may worsen in 2022

Chew on this

The White House will convene a national conference on hunger, nutrition, and health in September. [The White House]

The U.N. Committee on World Food Security “can have only limited engagement with the outcomes of the [Food Systems Summit] without more capacity support,” according to a new report. [Duke Sanford World Food Policy Center]

Members of the U.S. Congress want to waive rules that dramatically increase the cost of shipping U.S. food assistance overseas. [Agri-Pulse]