Rockefeller Foundation president predicts ‘massive’ global food crisis

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Rockefeller Foundation president predicts ‘massive’ global food crisis, calls on US to find solutions
The president of the Rockefeller Foundation is calling for what could amount to heavy investments from the U.S. to alleviate a food crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Wed Apr 27, 2022
(LifeSiteNews) — Rockefeller Foundation president Rajiv Shah is calling for the United States to take the lead in tackling a “massive, immediate food crisis” affecting many developing countries.

After describing what is “already a crisis” of poverty in developing countries, Shah pointed to the disruptive effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, noting the importance of the latter’s role as a wheat supplier in his Bloomberg Television interview with David Westin. For example, the United Nations World Food Program “buys 40% of its wheat” from Ukraine, according to Shah.

On top of that, Shah said, is the “fertilizer crisis, where you have farmers all over Africa no longer using fertilizer because it’s not available,” adding that “20% of it effectively came from Russia.”

Shah predicted that this fertilizer shortage “is going to lead to an even bigger food crisis this summer and this fall.”

Westin, along with Bloomberg’s Mike Morning, also pointed out in a subsequent article that the war “has put at risk exports of wheat, corn, sunflower oil and other foods from Russia and Ukraine that account for more than 10% of all calories traded globally, driving up food prices in low-income countries that are already reeling from pandemic damage to their economies.”

While Shah believes that there is a “global responsibility” to tackle the food crisis that requires “concerted leadership,” he believes the United States should lead the effort as the “unquestioned leader on food and hunger around the world” since World War II.

“I very much hope that emergency actions can be taken in a bipartisan manner that reestablishes American leadership to tackle this problem,” Shah told Westin.

Shah called for the full funding of the World Food Program, the pre-positioning of food in places where hunger is expected, and “emergency debt relief action” for heavily indebted developing countries, so that they can “use that money to actually buy food” for their people.

On March 24, The Rockefeller Foundation announced the launch of its new “Good Food Strategy,” in which it will invest $105 million to “support a shift in public and private spending toward foods that are nutritious, regenerate the environment, and create equitable economic opportunity” across the globe. Commenting on the need for the program, Shah cited Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as contributing to a “global humanitarian crisis” of food.

The initiative is to include investments in metrics that measure the environmental “footprint” of food production, and will also shift the “menu” of large institution towards foods that “benefit people and the planet.”

If an article co-written by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food Initiative managing director Sara Farley is any indication, the foundation is aiming for, among other goals, reduced meat consumption.

In the piece published on the World Economic Forum website, she and Sara Scherr cite a report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-FOOD) that not only refers to the meat sector as “high-emitting,” (in other words, contributing disproportionately to climate change), but groups meat with sugar and salt as contributing to “negative health effects.”

The Rockefeller Foundation has already laid out its program for food reform in the U.S., which entails similar objectives, in a report called “Reset the Table: Meeting the Movement to Transform the U.S. Food System.”