Resilience to Hunger

[Music]

google trends

claim that coronavirus was the most

searched keyword of 2020. no surprises

on instagram a simple search of hashtag

govern19

throws 39.7 million posts

and i’m pretty sure that it is

increasing exponentially with every word

i speak here today

it’s like the entire world is talking

about it suddenly

we have a new event to blame for every

problem we are facing today

market is crashing covered people are

hungry

go with people are dying go with

is it the pandemic or has it become a

default human functioning

to blame a problem and not solve a

problem

the pandemic has tested our resilience

as an individual

as a community and as a nation

let us talk about some statistics we all

love numbers

according to the world food programme

690 million people

go to bed hungry every night

one in six children in the u.s is food

insecure

fourteen percent of the indian

population is undernourished

and 42 42

of afghanistan population is hungry

do these statistics blow your mind well

these statistics do not shock me what

astonishes me is that

the rate of food insecurity is

increasing and so is the rate of food

wastage and the rate of obesity

not to forget the national gdps have

been increasing

rate of food prices have been increasing

food aid has been increasing

and so is the donation making power of

the richest of the rich

several deadly statistics are soaring

the sky but the buying capacity of the

poor

remains the same so will we still agree

that the pandemic has to be blamed for

everything

well the core with 19 pandemic just

re-emphasized

the need of an already existing demand

for building hunger resilient

communities

have you all heard about time travel let

us travel back

73 years the year is 1948.

we are in paris lovely romantic

mesmerizing the year is 1948 and we are

in paris the united nations general

assembly

proclaims the universal declaration of

human rights

article 25 of their declaration states

that every individual has a right

to a standard of living adequate for the

individual

and for the family including the right

to food

that is every individual has a right to

food

let us travel back a few more years the

year is 1941.

president franklin roosevelt highlights

the freedom from want in his famous

for freedom speech he talks about the

right to food

the time travel is over we are back in

2021 we are back in this auditorium

80 years later eight decades later

unfortunately

that fundamental human right to food is

still not binding by law

i would like to emphasize the three

pillars of right to food

food availability food adequacy

and food accessibility

now when i talk about food availability

or food adequacy

what comes to your mind food production

increase the food production because we

want to feed

millions of people increasing population

their children and their children

sustainable production organic

production

green revolution green revolution

my state punjab in my country india

was one of the first states to

experiment

with the high yielding variety seeds

the thing is whenever we think about

hunger or food insecurity

the only area of dimension we can think

about improving is

food production so the farmers in punjab

just like the farmers around the world

employed high yielding variety seeds

chemicals fertilizers and pesticides

in fact they replaced the diverse

cropping strategies

with wheat and rice monocropping all

this happened about

50 years ago and today we know that

production system was not entirely

sustainable

although it was very socially uplifting

for the farmers

but why i’m telling you about green

revolution when i’m just talking about

right to food the highlight is

when we ask a wrong question we receive

a wrong answer

our focus has always been food

production

we rarely think about food

inaccessibility and

food wastage from the country once

suffering from famine

to being one of the major rice exporters

of the world india

increased its production many folds but

did we solve food insecurity

did we solve hunger

35 percent of the indian children are

undernourished

the international food organizations

claim that the world has enough food

production

we have food it is available and it is

adequately available

then what is the problem the problem is

that food is not

accessible i must applaud

the very streamlined well-managed and

well-equipped

u.s child nutrition programs which

continue to exhibit a great example of

resilience

when compared to other countries but

today there are several nations who do

not have a national school feeding

program

the children in those countries rely

only on food aid

at the time of crisis wars natural

disasters

and pandemics

an anonymous person once said there is

more

fruit in a rich man’s shampoo than on a

poor man’s plate

raise your hands who are parents

teachers uncles and aunts of school

going children

or better if you know a school going

child please raise your hands

i would not ask if that child ate today

because i’m pretty sure that all of us

in this auditorium

are privileged enough to feed our

children

but i do want to know if you have wasted

a food or a meal in the past

week when you were eating at your home

whether you went to dine out or whether

you grabbed a takeaway

did you waste anything that was edible

do you recognize the problem the problem

is not that the food was not available

the problem was

that the food was available you had food

and you wasted

it food and agriculture organizations

estimate

that the amount of food waste we produce

amounts to 1 trillion dollars

a trillion dollar worth of food can feed

double the current hungry population

30 to 40 of the global food supply goes

waste

one of the 17 sustainable development

goals

calls for ending hunger and ensuring

safe

nutritious and sufficient access to food

for

all people worldwide by 2030 in 2019

two billion people did not have this

access again before the pandemic

google can tell you the 10 ways in which

we can build hunger resilient

communities

or hunger resilient schools or hunger

resilience school meal programs

but the need is not to make the school

meal programs more

resilient the necessities to not have

child hunger in the first place

so what are my two cents today i’m not

here to solve hunger i’m sorry

we are living in a world where one tweet

can change the face of stock market

don’t tell me that you do not have a

solution for hunger

first reduce food wastage second

empire the poor if hunger was to be

solved via food banks

food drives ngos and a billion dollar

donations

it would have been solved years ago and

i would not be here

i’m not undermining the noble work which

has been done

but now we need to change our lens

we need to update our strategies we need

to

make lesser round tables and take more

capacity building actions improvise

public private partnerships

make the poor more resilient in a way

that they have access to money

and to food third and most importantly

make the fundamental human right to food

as binding by law

thank you

[Music]

you