On World Food Day, Asia-Pacific countries consider bold plan to recover from COVID-19 and eradicate hunger

FAO: 16/10/2020 Bangkok

Every year, FAO’s Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific celebrates the importance of World Food Day. This year, given the COVID-19 global pandemic and the disruptions it has caused to livelihoods and food security, our celebrations are muted, yet within this context, today’s World Food Day itself has become more important than ever.

While the spread of the coronavirus has seriously disrupted food security and livelihoods for millions of people in this region, we also find ourselves off-track to meet the Sustainable Development Goals to end malnutrition and poverty.

This World Food Day’s theme, ‘Grow, Nourish, Sustain. Together – Our Actions are our Future’, underscores the need to immediately and urgently respond to, and recover from, the impact COVID-19 is having on our food systems and the billions of people that rely on them.

Recovering from COVID-19. What more appropriate day, than World Food Day

This World Food Day marks FAO’s 75 anniversary of its founding in 1945, just months after the end of a devastating world war, one that had left many parts of the world facing hunger and in some cases a real risk of starvation.  Today, as then, the world is facing a threat once again, as hunger is on the rise and the global pandemic is making matters worse. Action is needed immediately, as expressed by the FAO Director-General, QU Dongyu in a global video message, “tomorrow begins today,” he said.

In keeping with a long-standing tradition, the Regional World Food Day virtual event opened with a video message from Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, the FAO Special Goodwill Ambassador for Zero Hunger in Asia and the Pacific – a message of concern and hope.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the world and our Asia-Pacific region with an enormous challenge. Apart from the death, grief and suffering, it has also shocked economies and, while its impact is being felt by all, it has affected most seriously the poorest and vulnerable among us,” the Princess noted. “It has forced all of us to deeply examine the weaknesses of our food systems and consider ways and means to ‘Grow, nourish and sustain. Together’. Indeed, the actions we take today will be our future and I hope that we all learn the right lessons from this pandemic, repair the damage that has been done, and plan a resilient and sustainable recovery, one that can withstand future shocks such as COVID-19 and any of its successors.”

In full: http://www.fao.org/asiapacific/news/detail-events/en/c/1314864/