The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s report was released late on [September 12], and showed that the pandemic has had an impact on progress towards the UN sustainable development goals, with almost all being off track. The report also touched upon the food crisis and the climate crisis, two issues that pose a significant challenge to policymakers. Ahead of the release, Bill Gates spoke to Hindustan Times on how he sees the response to these challenges evolving.
“We’ve got a combination of things that have all been bad for food availability. We have climate change, which is hurting crop production, sooner than we expected. We have the Ukraine war that hurt food availability, but probably worse, it’s making the price of fertilizer be substantially higher, which means that the poorer farmers won’t have access, and so their yields in the years ahead will be dramatically less.
During the pandemic, grain prices went up. They went up more at the start of the Ukraine war, but they’ve come back down some. In the long run, unless we make better seeds, we have a real problem because you want to feed more people, you want richer diets, and climate change can cut productivity dramatically, so you know, the only thing that offsets that is improved seeds. So you know, it’s what the Green Revolution did, but this time, it’s understanding the environmental constraints and tuning the new crops so that they can work even under these much hotter and higher drought conditions that are coming faster than most predicted,” [said Bill Gates].
[Editor’s note: Read another viewpoint on this topic here, and read the full Gates Foundation report here.]
