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Rockefeller’s $105M plan to produce climate-friendly food
The pandemic sent global hunger soaring, but now the war in Ukraine is making the problem far worse. Since Russia and Ukraine together supply 30% of global wheat exports, a big chunk of the world is losing access to food.
Now one of the nation’s biggest foundations is trying to deal with some of these challenges with a $105 million plan to improve food access, make nutritious and healthy food more widely available, and advance production of food in ways that does not harm the planet.
Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said the commitment is the biggest nutrition effort in Rockefeller’s history. Over the next three years, the Good Food Strategy aims to ensure that 40 million people around the world have better access to healthy and sustainable food.
“Because of climate change, food prices were already the highest in a decade, even before Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine further decimated global food supplies. Now the world is on the precipice of a global humanitarian crisis,” Shah said in a statement.
The foundation and other experts say the way the world produces and consumes food is failing people and the planet. So it came up with a new strategy it hopes will shift the focus from increasing the quantity of food to improving its quality.
The announcement builds on one of philanthropy’s most successful efforts, the Green Revolution of the 1960s.
Rockefeller financed the technology that helped fuel production of food in a way that averted starvation in the world’s poorest countries. However, it lacked sustainability and equity. That’s what today’s effort is designed to tackle, foundation officials say.
Barron Segar, president of the World Food Program USA, agrees that something needs to be done now. Rockefeller gave the program $3.3 million in 2021 to supply nutritious food for school food programs in Africa.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-climate-science-business-health-f3d5bd023f7ecf1c2dd22affa738a0e6
Some interesting lines in this one.
> Another element of the Rockefeller plan is to focus on changing the mix of who produces food.
> Rockefeller financed the technology that helped fuel production of food in a way that averted starvation in the world’s poorest countries.