LONDON: The Ellen MacArthur Foundation and the Sustainable Food Trust have launched a challenge for the food industry to create new or re-designed products using circular design principles that regenerate nature.

By transforming the way products are made, food businesses and retailers can play a crucial role in creating a circular economy for food where nature is regenerated, helping to tackle climate change and biodiversity loss.

“We know the problems. The current food system is a key driver of biodiversity loss and accounts for a third of global greenhouse gases. By applying the principles of circular design to our food system, we can create food that regenerates nature and tackles some of our most pressing global issues,” said Foundation chair, Ellen MacArthur.

With 150 participants so far including Unilever, John Lewis, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s Coca-Cola, Danone, Google, Nestle, the Foundation has announced £500,000 in new grant funding with a goal of new food designs available in supermarkets by the end of 2024.

"The world's industrial food system wasn't designed for resilience or sustainability – qualities we would require if we built it today,” explained Wendy Schmidt, president and co-founder of the Schmidt Family Foundation. “Instead, we've spent the last 100 years working for mechanical efficiency at low cost, often sacrificing quality and ignoring externalities.

“The consequences of this approach are contributing hugely to climate destruction while leaving many people around the world without access to good food. If we don't dramatically change the way we source, produce, distribute and discard food, we face a future with ongoing plastic pollution, a warming atmosphere, and an Ocean losing both the oxygen we breathe and the marine life half the human population depends on for its primary protein.”

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy set up their organisation in 2006 to address sustainability issues and the responsible use of natural resources.

ROME/GENEVA: Five UN agencies report 735 million people face hunger worldwide - over 122 million more people since 2019 due to the pandemic, repeated weather shocks and conflicts including the war in Ukraine.

The goal of ending hunger by 2030 will not be reached say the heads of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), UNICEF, WHO and the World Food Programme (WFP), in a combined report.

Africa remains the worst-affected region with one in five people facing hunger, more than twice the global average.

“There are rays of hope, some regions are on track to achieve some 2030 nutrition targets. But overall, we need an intense and immediate global effort to rescue the Sustainable Development Goals. We must build resilience against the crises and shocks that drive food insecurity-from conflict to climate," says UN secretary-general António Guterres.

The report finds that approximately 29.6 percent of the global population, equivalent to 2.4 billion people, did not have constant access to food, as measured by the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity. Among them, around 900 million individuals faced severe food insecurity.

Meanwhile, the capacity of people to access healthy diets has deteriorated across the world: more than 3.1 billion people – or 42 percent – were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2021, an overall increase of 134 million people compared to two years previously.

Millions of children under five continue to suffer from malnutrition: in 2022, 148 million children under five years of age (22.3 percent) were stunted, 45 million (6.8 percent) were wasted, and 37 million (5.6 percent) were overweight.

“Hunger is rising while the resources we urgently need to protect the most vulnerable are running dangerously low,” comments WFP executive director Cindy McCain. “As humanitarians, we are facing the greatest challenge we’ve ever seen. We need the global community to act swiftly, smartly, and compassionately to reverse course and turn the tide on hunger.”

In 2020, the WFP was awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to combat hunger, its contribution to improving conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, and as a driving force to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.

Last year the world’s largest humanitarian organization provided assistance to 160 million people in 120 countries via a logistics fleet that includes 140 aircraft and 20 ships.

WARSAW: An international donor conference has raised US$6.5 billion for humanitarian aid to 7.7 million Ukrainian citizens internally displaced and a further 5.5 million now refugees in other countries.

After 10 weeks of Russia’s invasion, a new report from the World Food Programme (WFP) says conflict remains the main driver of food insecurity as ‘Putin’s War’ reveals the interconnected nature and fragility of global food systems, with serious consequences for global food and nutrition security.

“Acute hunger is soaring to unprecedented levels and the global situation just keeps on getting worse,” noted WFP executive director David Beasley. “Conflict, the climate crisis, COVID-19 and surging food and fuel costs have created a perfect storm - and now we’ve got the war in Ukraine piling catastrophe on top of catastrophe.

“Millions of people in dozens of countries are being driven to the edge of starvation. We urgently need emergency funding to pull them back from the brink and turn this global crisis around before it’s too late,” he added.

Published by the Global Network Against Food Crises – an alliance of UN agencies including the WFP plus the EU and NGOs – the report reveals that around 193 million people in 53 countries or territories experienced acute food insecurity at Crisis or Catastrophe levels in 2021.

This was an increase of nearly 40 million people compared with record numbers in 2020. Of these, 570 000 in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, South Sudan and Yemen faced starvation and death.

According to the report, the key drivers behind rising acute food insecurity in 2021 were:

• Conflict pushed 139 million people in 24 countries into acute food insecurity, up from around 99 million in 2020).
• Weather extremes hit over 23 million people in eight countries, up from 15.7 million in 15 the previous year.
• Over 30 million people in 21 countries suffered from economic shocks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If the war in Ukraine continues unabated, 47 million more people will face acute hunger - due to Russia’s theft of the country's farm equipment and destruction of its wheat supply - adding to a record 276 million people worldwide, an increase of 126 million since prior to the pandemic.

European Commissioner for International Partnerships Jutta Urpilainen commented: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine jeopardizes global food security. The international community must act to avert the largest food crisis in history and the social, economic, and political upheaval that could follow.”