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