Of course, it does not seem that the beginning of this decade will be remembered as a quiet period. After the global pandemic by COVID-19 that forced the majority of the world population to confine itself and the Ukrainian War, the alarm sounds and the risk of a possible recession appear as future events that we will all have to address in these 20s. However, in the deck of problems to be solved, there is one that stops . And it’s not just climate change.
The Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist refers to the lack of fight against hunger in Africa.
And that the current problems have removed this issue. After the war in Ukraine disrupted trade networks for wheat and other key food products, the United States and some other rich countries increased their food aid donations to countries in Africa and elsewhere hardest hit by skyrocketing prices.
This should be good news, but for Gates, it is the latest example of how backwards the approach to fighting world hunger is.
More aid, but less agricultural innovation to curb hunger
The problem, Gates said in an interview with , is that food aid is accelerating in response to war, economic turmoil and climate change, but investment in agricultural research in low-income countries is much lower and stagnant. .
Innovations in drought-tolerant seeds, tailor-made for African countries’ climates and crops, and other bespoke technologies available to scientists, offer a more effective and sustainable path to avoiding famine. The current approach, Gates hinted, is a Band-Aid that fails to heal the actual wound.
The only two SDGs where the Gates Foundation assesses that there is progress
Overall, according to a new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world is not meeting all 17 of the SDGs adopted by the UN in 2015, except for two, both related to child mortality: If the current rate of progress is maintained, the world should meet the goal of reducing preventable deaths of children under age 5 to 25 per 1,000 births by 2030, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, which provides data to the Gates Foundation.
The goal of reducing neonatal mortality to a minimum of 12 per 1,000 live births by 2030 should also be achieved.
But other goals—water, education, the spread of HIV and malaria, and other pressing social, environmental, and health issues—remain out of reach. “The pandemic and the war in Ukraine are partly to blame,” Gates told Quartz, but also “the unwillingness or inability of governments to reconsider their spending habits.”
“There is no doubt that food aid has saved many lives. But it is very complicated. Sometimes too little is given, sometimes too much is given and it causes the price of food to fall below the cost of production for local farmers. and it can disrupt normal agricultural markets,” he reflected on it.
There is no better example of this than looking to the African continent for him. “Given the cost of labor and the availability of land, Africa should be a net exporter of food. But due to low productivity, it is a net importer of food,” he argues.
“The urgency of the innovation pathway stems both from the need to increase African productivity and from the fact that the closer you get to the equator, the more damaging climate change will be to agriculture,” Gates argues.
For him, the solution is to train and empower African scientists. “Without better seeds, we will certainly fall short. If we move away from maize, rice and wheat, there has not been much innovation in sorghum, millet and cassava… Agricultural innovation has not been a priority for ecosystems and African crops,” he says.
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