Towards a Sustainable and Equitable Food Future: Reshaping Food Systems around Small-scale Producers

Drawing on IFAD’s 45 years of hands-on experience in agriculture and rural development, IFAD President Alvaro Lario outlines how reshaping food systems around small-scale producers can limit global warming, regenerate ecosystems, and end poverty and hunger. While food production generates one-third of all greenhouse gases, drives biodiversity losses, and uses about 70 per cent of the world’s freshwater and President Lario contends that sustainable food systems hold the potential to generate US$4.5 trillion in new business opportunities every year and to create more than 120 million rural jobs. He argues that decades of under-investment in food systems and glaring inequalities have left many farmers and other rural people cut off from economic opportunities. He reflects on the current global food crisis, which is worsening as more than 700 million people go to bed hungry every night. Ending poverty and hunger are fundamental to the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals and President Lario demonstrates that reshaping food systems could end poverty and hunger and limit the impacts of climate change on the world’s most vulnerable. About the Speaker: Alvaro Lario is President of the International Fund of Agricultural Development (IFAD). A seasoned international development finance leader, he has more than 20 years of experience across private sector asset management, World Bank Group and the United Nations, including as Associate Vice-President of Financial Operations at IFAD. Under his stewardship, IFAD became the first United Nations Fund to enter the capital markets and obtain a credit rating, enabling the IFAD to expand resource mobilisation efforts to the private sector. President Lario received a PhD in Financial Economics from the Complutense University of Madrid after completing a Master of Research in Economics at the London Business School and a Master of Finance from Princeton University.