ROME – The Italian capital celebrated World Food Day on Friday under the rallying cry “leave no one behind”, with head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) calling for a united approach to confront “a looming global food crisis”.
Also delivering messages on Friday were United Nations Secretary General António Guterres, Italian President Sergio Mattarella, Alvaro Lario, president of the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and David Beasley, executive director of the Rome-based World Food Programme (WFP).
In his address to a ceremony in Rome, FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu said the world needed to “harness the power of solidarity and collective momentum to build a better future where everyone has regular access to enough nutritious food”.
World Food Day is celebrated each year to mark the anniversary of the founding of FAO in Rome in 1945, in the wake of the end of World War II.
The main celebrations took place at FAO headquarters, but the organisation said there were hundreds of related initiatives being held in around 150 countries, with calls for action in more than 50 languages.
Officials said that this year’s commemoration was especially important since global food security was under threat. One of the biggest risks is rising prices for food, fertiliser, and energy, which has reduced grain supply and disrupted global supply chains, Xinhua reported.
The residual impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic have also had an impact on global food security along with persistent long-term challenges related to climate change and regional armed conflicts, officials said.
In his remarks, Guterres said this year was “a challenging moment for global food security”. Similarly, Mattarella called for greater action to prevent the world’s poorest from suffering from a lack of a healthy life, education, and the opportunity for social and economic growth.
Lario, meanwhile, said that this year, more than ever, World Food Day should be “a call to ramp up action to help small-scale farmers in rural areas, who supply food to their communities and countries, through crisis after crisis, despite inequality, vulnerability, and poverty”.
“My gravest concern is what’s coming next: a food availability crisis as the fallout from conflict and climate change threatens to sabotage global food production in the months ahead,” Beasley said.
In a statement, FAO estimated that as many as 828 million people worldwide were facing chronic hunger, and 3.1 billion people lacked the resources for a healthy diet.
Among those were nearly a million people at risk of famine in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen, according to the United Nations’ “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the Word” report released in July. – Bernama
