Immediate actions:
- Support harvesting in the war zone and avoid any measures that would disrupt global food trade and negatively affect global food security.
- Separate essential from non-essential goods. We need to balance the need for strong economic sanctions and the need to maintain recent levels of food production to avoid a catastrophe. I believe both is possible.
- Collaborate at scale. We need to urge all relevant parties to protect food and food-related goods as essential and support their supply, especially to import-dependent countries. This is a call on countries to release their grain stocks on the market and support the hunger relief efforts of the World Food Program.
- Governments and companies need to ensure that smallholder farmers and subsistence farmers receive full support to increase their agricultural output.
- And finally, fighting food shortages include fighting climate change. Agriculture has a major role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impacts, promoting biodiversity and enhancing resilience in food systems. Now is the time to prevent hunger crises through increasing sustainable productivity. Our first farmer-centric, science-based, digitally enabled collaborative Global Carbon Initiative, incentivizes the adoption of climate-smart farming practices.
Germán Franco Díaz