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President Biden: "The United States is making a $10 billion commitment to end hunger and invest in food systems at home and abroad".

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Brian Lehrer: Notice he didn't just say food, he said food systems. That, of course, was President Biden in his speech yesterday before the United Nations General Assembly, touching on a topic that is central to humanity, but often not at the center of conversations around diplomacy, hunger, and food systems. This year for the first time the United Nations will hold a first-of-its-kind Food System Summit that takes place tomorrow as part of the UN General Assembly. The aim of the Summit is to develop new global food systems and farming technologies that reduce poverty and hunger and protect the planet.

Here with me now to dig into some of the specifics and talk about why more than 300 civil society organizations and indigenous groups are actually boycotting the event is Agnes Kalibata, UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy to the 2021 Food System Summit. She has been the president of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Dr. Kalibata, so nice of you to join us. Welcome to WNYC.

Agnes Kalibata: Thank you for having me.

Brian Lehrer: And for representing the Secretary-General in this effort. The UN, from the stats that I'm seeing, says "811 million people faced hunger in 2020 with an increase of 118 million people in just the past year." Would you describe how the pandemic has affected the world's food systems?

Agnes Kalibata: Thank you. What you're seeing is that with the pandemic coming on board, so many people that were either wage earners, or that were living in food systems, but food systems, again, being the agricultural sector that we are producing just enough to eat. Most of these people have been affected by COVID-19, building on the fact that before COVID-19 there was climate change. A lot of people that were wage-earners, that were not able to maintain their jobs, that were not able to earn as much as they used to earn, have definitely been impacted.

Also, food production systems were interrupted, especially the ways in which food gets to supermarkets and all that, leading to an increase in prices of food, making it even more difficult for people that are living on the edge of good incomes, being impacted by the ability to have a good diet, the ability to access good food. That's really the impact of COVID-19.

Brian Lehrer: Now, the aims of the Summit, as I see it, that will take place tomorrow are broad and ambitious, and revolve around five action goals. I'll list these for our listeners, ensuring access to food for all, a shift to sustainable consumption patterns, to boost nature positive consumption, advance equitable livelihoods, build resilient food systems in areas that are prone to conflict or natural disasters. Those are five huge things. You wrote recently the definition of success for the Summit is necessarily messier and less linear than other processes. There will be no equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change. That's messy enough. Dr. Kalibata, what are some of the tangible successes that you're looking for this week?

Agnes Kalibata: The most important success I was looking for is to be able to shift mindset around food. Food is not just about ending hunger. Food is our culture, food is our economy, food nourishes us, food impacts our environment when it's not done right, and food impacts biodiversity. Food is so many things. To help each of us understand what food does is extremely important. I feel like we've done a whole lot of that, people are coming to the Summit now knowing very well the place and position of food in our system. The second one is that at country level, countries are now working on what we are calling food strategies, food pathways.

You heard the US President yesterday committing to end hunger within the American food system but also abroad. The fact that countries are now putting plans on the table, very clear plans, 97 countries have committed to those plans to start looking at food from a food systems perspective, both with health and environment included. Then the last one is the partnerships that we are building around coming through on food systems. For example, there's a partnership around ending hunger, which is partly what the contribution of the US government will be.

There's also a contribution around school meals, recognizing that 320 million children now don't have the right level of school meals since COVID happened. There's a number of things that people are coming together about, and those partnerships are going to be very critical to coming through from a food system perspective. It's those three things, really.

Brian Lehrer: I see that, in addition to representing the Secretary-General at the Food Summit tomorrow, you yourself are a Rwandan agricultural scientist and policymaker and President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and you served as Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture and Animal Resources from 2008 to 2014. Just a little background for our listeners about you, what's the situation in your country with respect to this?

Agnes Kalibata: My country comes from an interesting place in the sense that we've had all sorts of conflict, and you would know, even genocide and all that, but that's in the past. My country's significant, it's really recovered, at least genocide is not what you associate Rwanda with today. You associate Rwanda with progress, with women's rights, empowering women, and with an end to hunger. From a country that was too early living on the edge of every family being hungry, we are now a country that is significantly food secure. Rwanda is about development now. Yes, we've been taken a step back because of COVID, but it's one of the shining stars of the continent, definitely something I'm extremely proud of.

Brian Lehrer: As worthy as the goals of the Summit sound, who could be against increasing food production and decreasing inequality? There is, as I mentioned in the introduction, a big boycott of this Summit that's going to take place from civil society groups and groups representing various indigenous peoples. From what I read, they don't like the technological solutions being proposed that they say will threaten the livelihoods of smaller farmers, and peasants, and indigenous peoples, since they've not been meaningly consulted in these processes.

When your title even in the past is President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, the Green Revolution, as it's often referred to is sometimes seen as high-tech solutions for poor places that are actually bad for local agriculture, but turn it into global agribusiness. How do you address these concerns?

Agnes Kalibata: That's interesting. Before the Green Revolution became high-tech big business, it was about feeding people. It was about conventional breeding, moving from ability to produce half a ton per hectare to ability to produce five metric tons per hectare, so that families could move forward. The breakthrough in the Green Revolution was not about big business high-tech, the breakthrough was about people being able to end hunger in the countries that figured out how to do that. That was the biggest breakthrough. What we are trying to do on the African continent is to find our own breakthrough of ending hunger. We need to do that.

Yes, it requires technologies. Technologies, by the way, are things like improved seeds that are bred by local scientists and breeding very local varieties that we already use. This is not the high-tech that we are talking about. This is a very simple science that makes sure that the crop you're depending on is not eaten by pests and reducing yield, that is drought resistant. This is something that we will continue doing, we will continue ensuring that the African continent also has the ability to deal with the challenge of hunger. It is not a replacement for recognizing that our food systems are impacting the environment, we need to fix that problem as well.

Feeding people is not against doing the right thing with the environment. It's not either all, we have to do both. We have to feed people, and we have to do the right thing by the environment. This is what this Food System Summit is about.

Brian Lehrer: I read that the pre-Summit to this week's Summit was held in July and sparked an estimated 9,000 people to participate in a three day mostly online protest, and people complaining--

Agnes Kalibata: 22,000 people. In the protest, okay, sorry, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, in the protest, and they were complaining that farmers and peasants and indigenous peoples from various groups, we're not meaningfully consulted. What happened that these people feel excluded who represent so many affected individuals?

Agnes Kalibata: Just to give you an example of the level of consultation for indigenous communities, they've had the most diverse and the deepest consultation with the Food Systems Summit. We've had over 270 meetings across so many groups of indigenous people bringing in so many communities. They themselves will say that, they feel [unintelligible 00:10:38] consulted. We are working with groups of farmers, leaders of farmers from organizations where, for example, the Asian Farmers Association is reaching 87 million farmers on the African continent. The group we are working with is reaching millions of farmers.

I don't think that's the challenge or that's the biggest problem. The biggest problem that these groups have been bringing out is that they feel like there's corporate culture in the corporate association with the work we are doing within the Food Systems Summit. We keep telling them that the Food Systems Summit was created to create space so that people can dialogue. We talk to people, even when we don't agree with their views, we encourage them to come around the table so that we can understand what challenges they're working with.

Groups that haven't descended to exclude themselves, there's very little we can do. We listen to their views still and want to ensure that those issues they're informing what we are doing, but we would love to have them on the table and share their views and how we can together work to overcome some of these problems we are dealing with in our world.

Brian Lehrer: The clip we played at the beginning of President Biden saying the United States will invest $10 billion in food systems. $10 billion dollars, is that a lot? Is that a little in the context of this? Where will that money go?

Agnes Kalibata: We need $33 billion a year to deal with the question of hunger globally. If another 30 leaders like him stepped forward and put $10 billion on the table, we would be able to deal with the challenge of hunger. We have 811 million people that are hungry this year and all we need is $33 billion a year on this study. It's not huge money globally given the trillions of dollar, we leave on Mideast. If people are ambitious, enough was the Secretary-General called for, and people are willing to commit and people who are feeling that we need to live in a world that is a little bit more equitable. These are resources we can mobilize.

That's my hope, that leaders will step forward and understand that this is not a problem. This is a solvable problem. This is something we can do in our lifetime. This is something we can do in the next 10 years. I'm very proud because the President of the United States set a very good example of how come through for people will look like in this Summit.

Brian Lehrer: Can I ask you one thing on an unrelated topic before you go? If this is too far outside your portfolio, and you don't want to address it, just tell me. Being that you're an official from Rwanda and representing the Secretary-General, at least with respect to food, the Secretary-General opened the General Assembly yesterday in part by admonishing the developed world countries about hoarding vaccines. We know that the vaccine rate in some African countries is as low as 1% of the population. How's the pandemic, how's the vaccination rate in your country? What would you like to see the US and other wealthy countries do about it?

Agnes Kalibata: The vaccination rate is nowhere near what it should be. The pandemic is managed by countries, of course, knowing that they have nothing else, but to depend on themselves to manage this. We definitely are doubling down on ensuring that the pandemic is managed. What every country needs to understand that none of us is going to be safe until all of us are safe. Holding vaccines and saying, "We'll vaccinate our own", does not take the problem away. This virus is evolving very fast. It's mutating very fast and the only way to get rid of it and to get back to normal fast enough is to be able to fix the problem globally. This is not a problem that America can fix and America feel safe [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: We just have 15 seconds left, unfortunately. In your opinion, should the United States not give its own population boosters, but just give more money to global vaccination?

Agnes Kalibata: No. Everybody needs to vaccinate. I said nobody is safe until all of us are safe. You need to be safe here in the US, but so the rest of the world. We all need to be safe from the virus.

Brian Lehrer: Agnes Kalibata, the UN Secretary-General Special Envoy to the 2021 Food Systems Summit, which is tomorrow. Thank you so much for giving us your time today.

Agnes Kalibata: Thank you for having me.

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