In his first week in the job, the new head of the UN's agricultural finance fund admits he has no small task ahead. Alvaro Lario takes over the role of head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development amid a global food crisis, which he warned could become a regular occurrence.
Lario wants the IFAD to focus on the resilience of small-scale farmers so they can produce food for themselves and not be left at the mercy of external shocks.
Resilient means that when you have a shock to your income like now, with inflation when you have a shock coming from extreme climate, you are not going to fall into poverty or food insecurity, said Lario.
The current food crisis, exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, would happen again and soon unless world leaders address decades of underinvestment in how food was grown and delivered, he warned.
He said that hundreds of billions of dollars needed to be directed towards small farms by investing in water and soil conservation, offering low-interest loans, access to markets and boosting productivity.
They are currently not able to produce their own food, and many of them have to sell their assets because they don't have enough to feed themselves. Lario said that the impact of war in Ukraine had disrupted the shipping of key crops for months and caused fertiliser prices to jump, worsening existing problems, as 150 million people had fallen into hunger before the war.
Even if we resolve the Ukraine war in two to five years, we will be in the same situation if we don't invest now in terms of tens or hundreds of billions, he said.
We have had a lot of climate shocks, droughts, and flooding that have made it worse in the short term, but generally we have not paid enough attention to how food is produced, how food is distributed, how food is stored, and the creation of jobs in many rural areas is at the forefront of the crisis. The IFAD is a Rome-based UN financial agency that works with the UN s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme, as well as the private sector to promote food security through sustainable agriculture by providing grants and cheap loans to farmers in developing countries.
After Russia's invasion of Ukraine in March, global food prices are at their highest recorded levels and remain 8% higher than a year ago.
There is concern about the continued high price of fertiliser affecting agricultural productivity, with sanctions limiting shipments from Russia, the world's largest exporter of fertiliser, as well as a reduction in the amount coming from China and lower overall fertiliser production in Europe.
Lario said that the international community needed to finance farmers who did not receive assistance from their governments, unlike farmers in richer countries because of the heightened prices that were hard for farmers to pass on to consumers.
He said that the best way to tackle poverty, tackle food insecurity, tackle the financing of food systems, needs to start with this long-term rural transformation and bring small-scale producers to the table.