Earlier this year, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council that a global food crisis “is creating a hellscape of hunger and heartache for many of the world’s poorest people.” Climate and conflict are driving food shortages, he said.

Continued heating of the planet is likely to cause food supply shocks and a decline in food production.

Catherine Bertini has long worked at the intersection of food and security issues. Currently she leads The Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts to combat the global food crisis—including support for a US State Department-led initiative for climate-resilient agriculture, and for the newly established Kofi Annan Commission on Food Security, which aims to transform the global food governance system. Bertini also chairs the executive board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust and is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

She was named the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate for her leadership of the World Food Programme from 1992 to 2002. Later, she co-chaired a US program called Feed the Future, a global hunger and food security initiative created during the Obama administration.

Bertini led UN humanitarian missions to the Horn of Africa, Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel. She has worked in the private sector, the academic world, at foundations and a think tank, and served in local, state, and national governments.

Bulletin contributing editor Dawn Stover spoke with Bertini about the United Nations’ twin (and perhaps not entirely compatible) goals of eliminating global hunger and stabilizing global climate. They also delved into the dire food situation in Gaza, how a revival of traditional African crops might help the continent withstand extreme weather, and the dialogue that is finally happening between agriculture and climate experts.

(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)

Dawn Stover: What would you like our readers to know about the scale of global hunger today?

Catherine Bertini: There are statistics collected by the Food and Agriculture Organization. They count the number of people who live on less than a dollar a day and who therefore, they believe, are food-insecure to the point of not being able to cope, and that number right now is about 860 million people. From 1950 until today, population increased dramatically, but a fairly static number of people—around 700 million—remained desperately hungry. The basic reason why so many people are hungry is poverty. As the population has increased, so has economic opportunity, but there’s still generational hunger: A mother is hungry, and she gives birth to a child who is sick, and if they survive they both go hungry and malnourished from the beginning. On top of that comes COVID-19, comes the war in Ukraine—which impacted a lot of global markets. And then climate issues. And so on. All of those have combined to increase the number of people who are hungry.

Stover: Why has it gotten worse in the past few years, and where does that put the United Nations’ goal of reaching zero hunger by 2030?

Bertini: Well, two points. One is that most of those numbers I was talking about don’t even include the vast numbers of people who are living in war. And so the Gaza numbers would be in addition to this.

And yes, the numbers are going up, they’re going in the wrong direction. The UN member states said that by 2030 they had to be at zero hunger. Well, it’s pretty hard to get to zero hunger if the numbers are going up, not down. The last time there was a temporary increase in the number of hungry people was during what we called the food price crisis, and that was roughly 2008 to 2011. That’s when President Obama created the Feed the Future program, and there was more funding and attention placed on countries to try to help them improve their own agricultural livelihoods. That’s when there was the G7 [summit] in L’Aquila, Italy, when there were commitments by many member states to do more about food security. The Italians are coincidentally chairing the G7 again this year, and they have indicated that food security will be on their agenda. And the Brazilians are chairing the G20 this year. They’ve indicated that hunger is a top priority for them.

I guess some of us who are optimists hope it means that governments will stand up and pay attention.

Stover: The United Nations also has a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. How we can achieve those two goals—climate and hunger—simultaneously, given that agriculture is already responsible for something like a quarter of all emissions, and emissions are probably going to go up as food demand grows? They seem like two goals that don’t play well with each other.

Bertini: Well, they can play better, I think, than they have in the past. And on a positive note, I think that, generally speaking, the agricultural industry has been paying much more attention to this. For instance, the global dairy industry has very significant programs to decrease the methane gas that is produced by dairy cows. All the agricultural industries have really been paying more attention to this, in part because their customers want them to. At the same time, in developing countries there’s a pushback, saying: “Wait, wait, you wealthier countries had your beef, you had your dairy, so don’t now tell us we can’t have them.” So that’s another impetus for the industry, globally, to try to decrease their negative contributions. And then there’s this other initiative… Are you familiar with the VACS [Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils] initiative?

Stover: That’s a State Department-led effort to develop crops that are more resilient to climate change?

Bertini: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s a combination of issues involved: climate, soils, nutrition, and African crops that have been—well, they’re called “opportunity crops,” but other people have called them forgotten crops or neglected crops. But they’re traditional African crops. These are crops that are well known in certain regions and certain communities but never took off like wheat and rice and maize. People, including African farmers, looked at the crops where they were going to get the largest amount of cash. So these other crops—like cassava or teff [a grass cultivated for its edible seeds], lentils, cowpeas, a lot of tree crops, or different kinds of beans—they’re grown, they’re marketed, they’re used in Africa, they’re just not cash crops.

Stover: So the US might help incentivize those crops being brought back, because they would be more climate-resilient than these other big commodity crops?

Bertini: Yes, there are two issues: One is what’s being done, and second is what’s the US role.

So what’s being done with this initiative is they started with a long list of traditional African crops. And then they had a review done by nutritionists: Of these crops, which ones are the most nutritious? And then they had that list reviewed by climate scientists, led by Cynthia Rosenzweig at Columbia. And the question there was, which are the most climate-hardy?

As the result of that, there are a smaller number of crops that have been described as very nutritious and sturdy—when they are subject to not enough or too much rain, for instance—and then those crops are now being promoted through various systems. There’s a lot of interest developing among donors and others about investments in these crops, and whether we need to invest still in the science part of it, or right now in the growth part of it, in the marketing part of it. State Department created this idea, promoted the idea, built a lot of interest around the idea, and then my group at The Rockefeller Foundation funded these studies that I referred to. And now State is actually deciding how this could operate in the future, because it’s not going to be a US government grant or anything. It’s just an idea. They’re launching it into the world for it to be managed by a whole conglomerate of international organizations.

Stover: Let’s go back to the time when you were directing the UN World Food Programme. Were people there thinking about climate impacts on agriculture back then, or is that something that developed later?

Bertini: We were thinking about climate impacts in general, including in agriculture, but not just agriculture. So for instance, in the late ‘90s we invested a fair amount of resources in West Africa in anticipation of El Niño. We tried to invest in having farmers be better prepared to deal with whatever was going to come through: invest in ports, invest in transportation systems. I mean, we looked at the totality of how this climate crisis might impact this region, and in fact it didn’t during that time, so we were able to invest in it, but we didn’t have to use it. Other times, when there were droughts, we tried to anticipate how the coming drought was going to impact the population and then what could we do to pre-position systems or food or anything else to try to help people get through the crisis.

Stover: How well-equipped are international organizations today for monitoring food insecurity and forecasting dire events, regardless of whether it’s extreme weather or war or something else that causes an event?

Bertini: I think there are some good systems. The “but” is that donors aren’t willing to invest in pre-mitigation. I mean, look at what’s happening right now in Gaza. It’s an extreme example, but they’re trying to feed people almost after the fact, as opposed to investing ahead of time.

Stover: How could they help prevent not just famine, but also the weaponization of food insecurity in some of these conflicts like Ukraine and Gaza?

Bertini: They could anticipate a crisis coming, and obviously it’s more likely climate than the other one, at least in the ability to actually do something. But no matter what kind it is, helping to build an infrastructure and to support the local infrastructure is really critical: the transportation systems, the communication systems, the ability for farmers to get their goods to market, the strength of the markets, and the emergency stocks of food. All of those are components of preparation, and donors just don’t get there. Gaza may not be such a good example, but there are lots of examples in Ethiopia and Sudan, the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo], really in a lot of places. Ukraine, even, as well.

Stover: What are the climate scenarios that you are most worried about for food systems?

Bertini: Either the unpredictability of the weather—or the lack of communication about what’s going to happen with the weather—is huge. Farmers really count on knowing something about what’s going to happen, at least in the near future, when they decide what they’re going to plant.

Stover: What about a multiyear period of extreme weather—whether that was heat or drought or flooding or whatever? Or a single year where there were simultaneous droughts in several different regions of the world that are the bread baskets? How do we prepare farmers for that kind of an event?

Bertini: Yes, that’s a top priority. The best way to ultimately do that is to ensure that there’s either a national or a regional ability to make predictions, I mean scientific predictions, about what might occur, and that that is well communicated to the FEMA equivalent—the emergency management equivalent—in every country so that they can help build the capacity, depending on what the needs will be.

Stover: Is that the kind of thing that could be incorporated in food security and development work?

Bertini: I think so.

Stover: Are there projects that are trying to do that already?

Bertini: I’m sure that there are. Not being in the middle of it, I can’t give you good ideas right now about who’s doing what, other than there’s not enough. But I want to circle back to years ago, when I was at the WFP [World Food Programme], and I went to Kenya during this drought of 2000 and 2001, and Secretary-General Kofi Annan made me a special envoy for the drought. So I had a mandate beyond WFP to look at all aspects—health aspects, children’s aspects, older people’s aspects, how the drought might impact on markets, on institutions, and so forth. In that context, I met with Richard Leakey—a couple of years ago, he passed away.

He was an anthropologist of some renown, and so were his parents, and he was a Kenyan who the president at the time appointed to be the super cabinet secretary or … I don’t remember the title, but he could dip into any department to try to react to the drought. And also, frankly, Kenya had some issues with corruption, so he had a broad mandate to try to fix things.

But relevant to our conversation today, when I was meeting with him, he said: “The way we need to look at droughts is that they are like African winters.”

What he meant by that was, “You all in the North, you have these freezing winters, lots of snow, which could totally debilitate you except you’ve built systems around being able to deal with them. But when a drought comes, we say ‘Oh no, it’s another drought!’ and we start from scratch. What we need to do is to think through the system ahead of time, so that we can build our own resilience.”

Stover: In your work you’ve done a lot with empowering women and educating girls. Do women have a specific role to play in the world of food and climate?

Bertini: First and foremost, it’s the role of women to feed the family. I still think, after all these years since the Beijing Conference in ’95, that we’re still overlooking the potential role of women. I’ve seen so many communities in the Global South where girls help their mothers with the cooking, and they also are the people most likely to fetch water and firewood. And I was proposing that girls could be recruited to be the stewards of their local environment, because they know exactly what the water sources are like—how abundant or not they are, how polluted or not they are. They know daily about the state of the potential for firewood, and the trees. What an amazing climate resource girls could be.

Stover: Climate experts haven’t always given a lot of thought to food. Wasn’t it only recently that the COP [Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] meeting finally started paying a lot of attention to food?

Bertini: They’re finally talking to each other. Finally, finally. For years, the agriculture people would just be shaking their heads. They’d be knocking on the door, and the climate people just didn’t want to talk to them. And it’s so hard to believe, given the impacts of agriculture on the environment. So yes, it’s only a year ago or so that there was actually a space. And now, all of a sudden, there’s such an interest in going to the COP, and half the food security world is there, and there’s finally a real discussion about it. The UAE ministry, this last time, put a priority on it; that certainly helped. And so there is finally, finally a dialogue.

Stover: You mentioned COVID earlier, and obviously that had some effects. We saw a lot of disruptions of the food supply chain. Is the supply chain stronger now than before the pandemic?

Bertini: I sure hope so. I don’t know how much we’ve really learned, post-COVID, because I think the most important learning was that we’re all in this together. It’s not just a health thing, any more than climate is just a science-people thing. We’re all in this—“we” meaning health and agriculture and food and nutrition and transportation and education and trade. Our biggest learning in both the issue of COP and the issue of COVID is that we can’t solve any of these problems if we just limit ourselves to one field and say: “We’ll handle this.” Because we can only have real progress if we are coalitions of interest.

Stover: I want to ask you more about Gaza, since I know you led a humanitarian mission there in the past. What are your thoughts about the food situation there now?

Bertini: Stop the war. Dropping food is useless. It’s a PR thing. Maybe building a port or a dock or whatever they’re going to build along the shore will have some use if it’s used to get huge volumes of food in, but then they have to move through the region. We’ve seen already that that’s been very problematic. The best way to move food through the area is through trucks from the borders—many, many trucks every day. And that really has not happened since the military action in Gaza. When it stops, then the trucks can move, and people can get food.