 Thank you, everyone. I would like to call up Dana Eidsnes, the governor, senior entry hunger policy advisor who will be introducing our speaker this evening. Thanks, Allison. I was saying earlier that the World Affairs Council of Maine is responsible for much of my career up to this point. I used to ditch classes at Portland High School to go to World Affairs Council meetings and events at the Unitarian and Universalist Church in Portland. So, good evening friends. I joined Governor Mills Policy Shop back in February and in this new role I have the privilege of coordinating the implementation of Maine's Roadmap to End Hunger by 2030 which aligns with the UN's Sustainable Development Goal number two, Zero Hunger. This is a comprehensive strategy developed under the leadership of Commissioner Beal and her staff at the Department of Agriculture Conservation and Forestry and informed by the contributions of over 200 Mainers from Maine's cabinet agencies, business community, non-profit organizations, food security network, agricultural community and most importantly by people with lived experience or living with poverty and food insecurity in our state. So, this Roadmap is a two-part plan that aims to feed people where they are today with nutritious, culturally appropriate food sourced locally as much as possible and to deliver this food consistently with supply chains and distribution in place to ensure that Mainers have enough to nourish themselves every day. The second part of the Roadmap takes on almost everything else in Maine's economic development space. It's about well-paying jobs, access to child care, access to health care, affordable housing and transportation. All the things that go into making a dignified and healthy life for people and their families. Hunger is a symptom of poverty and to beat it, we need to take on the systemic issues that hold hunger in place. So, rising costs of food, housing, child care and other basic household necessities are creating barriers to financial stability for many Mainers, which also keeps food security out of reach. This is true throughout the U.S. and according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Economic Research Service, currently 34 million households don't have enough food to meet their needs, greatly affecting their health, well-being and quality of life. In 2020, as the pandemic took root, 60 million people, 60 million Americans, almost one in six, turned to the charitable food system for health. In Maine, we've identified 11.4 percent of households in the state are impacted, or over 153,000 people a year. That's roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Maine's four largest cities. Over 18 percent of Maine's children, almost one in five, are impacted and there are five counties in Maine where one in four children are impacted in Washington, Eruistic, Somerset, Piscataquus and Oxford counties. These numbers represent people, people living, working, growing up and growing old in every community in Maine. And it's important to note that 43 percent of food insecure Mainers don't income qualify for supplemental nutrition assistance or SNAP, which was formerly known as food stamps. This is the nation's largest domestic food and nutrition assistance program for low income Americans. They're working, they earn too much money to qualify for SNAP benefits and still can't afford to put food on the table. These are people you see every day. 33 percent of Maine's home health aids are food insecure, 42 percent of single parents, 22 percent of restaurant workers in Maine, 17 percent of Maine's grocery store workers. And food insecurity rates are two to four times higher in certain communities in Maine and among certain demographics. Almost 52 percent of African immigrants are food insecure in Maine, 28.3 percent of all people of color and 49 percent of people with a disability that prevents them from working are food insecure in Maine. It's unacceptable. Maine's ending hunger by 2030 roadmap addresses these urgent issues and will reframe the narrative of hunger and food insecurity as a collective responsibility that impacts all Maine people. I've been on the job for a few months now and I've assembled an advisory committee to help implement the roadmap and there'll be a stakeholder group to continuously inform our work. This work will empower and include impacted people and we're going to bring an equity lens to everything we do. There is good news in all of this. We live in a state that was first in the nation to constitutionally recognize food as a right for all people and that was among the first to implement permanent universal free school meals for children. And we know what works. During COVID, the United States responded with emergency allotments to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, dramatically increasing benefits for many Americans. And we sent out federal child tax credit payments to all Americans or all U.S. families during that time in the U.S. During that time, we cut childhood poverty nearly in half in only six months. The SNAP emergency allotments and child tax credits have ended this year and we're now seeing food insecurity rates and child poverty on the rise again. We know how to fix this. Meanwhile, the food shortages and logistics challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impacts of climate change and world conflicts are creating challenges worldwide and we're feeling those impacts in Maine. A few thoughts I'll leave with you. The first being that world conditions are interconnected. What's happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola is impacting us here in Portland. Deficiencies and struggles in global supply chains and food production impact everyone. Next, hunger in the United States is a policy choice. Through our pandemic response safety net programs, which were temporary, we know that policy measures can quickly and dramatically reduce poverty rates and hunger, ending needless suffering for our citizens and their families. What we allow will continue. To tackle the urgency of ending world hunger, comprehensive approaches are required including investment in agricultural development, rural infrastructure, social safety net programs, climate resilience and sustainable and inclusive economic growth. Strengthening international cooperation, promoting equitable access to resources and addressing the root causes of hunger are crucial in achieving lasting solutions worldwide. Our aim is that Maine can be a model of success in this work. So thank you for the opportunity to speak briefly tonight about Maine's work in the anti-hunger space. It's such an honor to be here and at this time I have the great privilege of introducing and welcoming our keynote speaker to the stage. Daniel Gustafson serves as the special representative of the Director General at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO. From 2012 until his retirement in 2020, he served as Deputy Director General of the Organization. He has over 40 years of international experience working on approaches linking science and policy for food and nutrition security, sustainable agricultural transformation and capacity development. Dan joined FAO in 1994 in Mozambique and subsequently served as FAO representative in Kenya and Somalia, India and Bhutan and as head of FAO's Washington D.C. office before moving to FAO's headquarters in Rome. He also worked in Brazil for the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, IICA and served as Program Manager of the International Development Management Center at University of Maryland. Dan holds a PhD in Agricultural Extension from the University of Maryland, a Master of Sciences in Agricultural Economics and a Bachelor of Science in Economics and International Relations from the University of Wisconsin. In 2015, he was conferred a PhD honoris causa by the Akara N.G. Ranga Agricultural University called Angrao in India. He's here tonight to speak with us about the new urgency in the fight to end world hunger. Dear people, please give a warm welcome to Daniel Gustafson. Okay, well thanks very much for that very kind introduction. Dana, some of you, I hope all of you, heard us yesterday on the main calling. It was a really good program that Dana and I were on, on the issues of hunger both in Maine and globally and it was fascinating really to compare notes and listen to what is happening in Maine and what Dana is now working on. It's just a real privilege to be here and speak. It's just a delight to be here in Portland and see some old friends and be able to speak to you. The title was chosen by Allison and I think it could not be more appropriate in the idea of new urgency in the fight against global hunger and why, why new urgency, right? Why or a renewed urgency? Why, what's going on? And I think in a nutshell and I've got a graph to show this in just a second, the world was making really good progress from about 2000 to 2014, 2015 during the period when the Millennium Development Goals had been agreed by the member states of the UN and the goal was at that time to cut hunger in half by 2015 and the world did not make it to half to cut it in half but it came quite close actually and I'll show that in the slide in a second but then contrary to expectations it stopped declining and it was, it remained about where it was until COVID hit and COVID was just huge in its impact on food security and we expect of course that COVID would have a huge impact but we'll I hope unpack that a little bit and see how those consequences of COVID continue to affect what is in fact the economic impact kind of an economic pandemic of COVID that continues to kind of royal the country. Likewise when we look at what is often called acute malnutrition the kind of localized humanitarian crises that we think of in places with drought or conflict or kind of collapse those have also gone up a lot in that period and we started to FAO and together with now 17 other agencies produce a report every year on global food crises and the first year that it came out was 2017 based on 2016 data and it has never gone down and it looks and is getting worse and I think that the question is then why are we going in the wrong direction and we'll get into that that's really kind of the main point of the talk but a lot of it has to do with inequality environmental issues climate change COVID and conflict and I have to say and I'm sure my colleagues would agree that this is a surprise to us I mean we tend to be those of us who work in in international agencies tend to be optimistic because we see lots of success we see lots of good stories and success stories and we're used to having things improve I was talking with Bob more earlier about Mozambique and how how much Mozambique has has improved that's fantastic since I worked there and when it's in starting in 1994 it's really kind of a different world and most countries have in fact improved a lot the least developed countries the World Bank classified countries and middle income upper income low income there are only 27 low income countries now and there are at least in FAO we have 192 member countries 27 of those are low income everybody else is middle income and it's in some ways a surprise to us to see how much progress there was however certainly we hope for more by this point in reducing hunger but we are really surprised by this lack of progress and I think looking at the at the underlying causes which are really quite important and problematic and very serious is I think what the explanation is and it is time it's always been time there's always been urgency to to eradicate hunger but there we really need renewed commitment and and think through we just have not I think kept pace in spite of all the good work in spite of a lot of innovation including policy like those that Dana mentioned in countries a lot of innovations funding has been reasonably good in spite of all that we were not making any progress from about 2014 onward and now we are in really a dramatic decline and and I'll get into that very quickly before we get into the into the the numbers just a little bit of background to kind of make sense of some of them the idea of measuring food insecurity or hunger and a commitment to reduce it or to eradicate it it's a relatively new thing 1996 world food summit in Rome was the first time that the country's heads of state was a summit heads of state and government got together to agree to cut hunger and half by 2015 that was then rolled into the millennium development goals and that covered the period from 2000 to 2015 and as I mentioned there was just a lot of progress on that and I'll show you on this slide what it looks like and you can see I'm not sure I need the pointer because this one is actually pretty straightforward but you can see this is the percentage and that's the number and if we were going to reduce it by half we would have gotten down to six and a half percent we got down to 7.8 percent poverty which was another element of the millennium development goals more than reduced by half and then you know from this period here to here not much happens we're going to run out of steam there and then it shoots up from 2019 this is the latest numbers we have from 2021 shoots back up to 9.8 and we didn't have 9.8 until back here in about 2006 so that really is quite a severe deterioration so the world food summit 1996 agrees on kind of a definition of food insecurity that has elements of availability is there enough food in the marketplace or produced access to people are they able to afford it are they able to reach it also an element of utilization is it food that they can absorb that's let's say in line with their culture and so on and is it stable is it sustainable at that at that level then just a couple of words on how we measured this they it's a it's a I think quite a good indicator because it uses it's called the prevalence of undernourishment and it utilizes kind of the least amount of information that's readily available that can be calculated essentially every year for every country and it looks at how much food is available in the country and what the distribution of income the demographic distribution and kind of how that plays out and then out of that you come up with an estimate of the number and percentages of undernourishment that's updated as we get more information from the countries and others a slide I'll get to that shows how we update that and it is reasonably okay then I mean it's I think it's remarkable that we can do it given how complicated this could be then after that success in millennium development goals a lot of the countries Latin America in particular who did remarkably well they got down to I think South America I'm not sure was for all of Latin America it got down to 4.2 percent and we considered in FAO below 5 percent for a country was kind of the goal if you get below 5 percent that's kind of you have an eradicated hunger but it's there's a remnant that needs always going to need support and they got down to 4.2 percent and they said look this idea of cutting hunger and half what about the other half we need to eradicate we need to eradicate hunger and they passed a resolution among themselves in I think 2013 to eradicate hunger and that was then rolled into the sustainable development goals of that came out in 2015 I wouldn't say overly optimistic I mean I don't know that people really thought we would eradicate hunger but there was a lot of momentum to go more than cutting it in half it looked like don't mess around eradicate hunger and it was led largely by Brazil and some other countries that had made remarkable success in that and in that at that same time then for sustainable development goals they also created a new indicator called the food insecurity experience scale building on the experience of the US that USDA has in questions on how to a statistic sample of the country or the state that asks in a relatively few questions eight in our in our case how severe your level of food insecurity is and they created an indicator of moderate food insecurity and severe food insecurity severe food insecurity is when you have run out of food really and you don't know where it's coming from moderate is where you go throughout the year at times where you don't have enough to eat you miss meals and you are always kind of worried about it that also has the advantage as it will come up in a minute also has the advantage of being able to separate between differentiate between men and women and other things that that turns out to be I think a particularly important aspect as we as we go forward okay so then one of the reasons that the graph that the line tapers off in 2014 is due to China and this is the graph we updated FAO updated the data on China with new information on distribution of income and this is the line for this is with the new numbers with including China and you can see that's what we thought the graph looked like globally or did that's what the graph looks like globally but if you take out China this is what it looks like so that difference between the kind of oranges brown and the green is the contribution of China and China just made fantastic progress over that period in eradicating and in diminishing hunger eradicating rural poverty and diminishing hunger and that pretty much runs out of steam right about here in like 2010 because they've they pretty much achieve what they were after it's just a phenomenal achievement for China that I think we don't think about so much anymore but you could also see even if you take China out of the equation we're still making pretty good progress here from 2005 it's still coming down coming down and then in 2014 it stops and then it starts going up again and this is pre-covid right so what's happening and there I think what we see and that's kind of the maybe my conclusion here is that we see increasing impact of conflict climate and inequality on kind of what's remaining and then this with COVID just really kind of really kind of took off then if you look at I should probably emphasize this because we think of the the undernourished globally as such a huge portion of the population but you know the non-undernourished is a 7.1 billion right I mean the number the 768 million is the midpoint sometimes you see numbers like 858 it's because we when the first year comes out it's in a range later on we might have we improve it a little bit but the undernourished 768 million far too high but don't forget we have 7.1 billion who are not undernourished as you can see in most of those are in Asia and Africa a lot of Asia is still in South Asia Pakistan India now Sri Lanka Bangladesh Myanmar and others and in Africa that is the other large contributor then we get into COVID and COVID was expected to have a big impact but at the beginning that impact and I think maybe all of us thought this would be on not having availability of food we saw it here the farmers were dumping milk you couldn't get toilet paper now there was a food item but it was this supply chain business that stopped everything and it looked like this is going to be really bad there's not going to be availability of food that didn't happen the other worry was that countries as in 2008 in the food price crisis it wasn't really a supply crisis it was a record year also but countries kind of a domino effect started to to prohibit exports and then everybody they were worried they weren't going to get we're going to have enough food so then they've stopped their exports and it just kind of rolled over and then there was really a shortage in a lot of countries that lasted for a little while and there was a worry that this would also happen with COVID that also didn't happen I think due to improvements in the way that countries through FAO and a consortium including USDA and others put together this agriculture market information system so you you don't let that happen and that didn't happen either so we think okay maybe we're going to be not so bad here but in fact what we had was the great lockdown and this was just a devastating impact on lots of the world and especially those who could least afford it if you think here for example in the U.S. that we buy our food in supermarkets supermarkets stayed open and a lot of our supermarkets are really big Walmart is a supermarket you know you could live in you know you do you could buy pretty much everything you need in a Walmart and it's still open whereas for most of the world in the countries that have the highest food insecurity they buy food in the local market and the local market looks like an incubator of COVID so they shut those people who sell the food lose their income people who buy the food can't buy the food there they have to go to the supermarket or some other place and they pay more their income goes way down and there were just a lot of other repercussions schools closed 39 billion school meals were not served during COVID the impact on so many things that spun off from that are just we're just devastating on food on food security but not because of of let's say the reasons that were anticipated but because of this economic impact the countries that were poorest let's say or not the countries that the lowest 20% of the world's the let's say the least the poorest 20% of the world's population lost about twice as much as the top 20% the top 20% is really big it's not like you know fat cat billion is just the top 20% of world income they lost proportionately much less and it was those that could least handle it were the ones that suffered the most and not only that but the recovery after that was also very uneven and interestingly in the next slide and there are unfortunately I think too many numbers here to show to make sense of but if you look the the region that suffered the most in between 2019 and 2021 was South America not Central America not Sub-Saharan Africa but South America urban very middle income and they went from if you look at the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity they went from 30% to 40% you know it's a it went up by a third whereas for Sub-Saharan Africa they went up from 57 58% to 63% which is a serious problem but South America is the one that suffered the most and the reason they suffered was because of of it was much more impact because of the impact in urban areas and the impact of the informal sector so if you're in the formal sector you probably have some kind of you know some kind of keep your income like you know essentially like we did or you would have some you're also probably wealthier but if you're in the informal sector and you are don't really have any employer except what you do during the day and you're cut out from that you're in big trouble and that's exactly what happened the impact on poverty was huge the impact in Sub-Saharan Africa and the urban population was about 15 was about 44% the impact in rural Africa was about 15% so much less an urban phenomenon informal sector just the repercussions just roll through and were devastating and continue to be devastating on this one again it's it's sort of the same issue but now with the prevalence of undernourishment this was their low point 4.2 percent again 4.2 percent they're kind of there this was you know it should be zero but okay if you get under five you're okay and it's almost a double that with COVID in South America which is among the most developed of the let's say outside of North America and and Europe and this slide the next slide is I think particularly telling in that this is what happened this is what they lost the poorest 20 percent and this is the richest 20 percent and what happened in the recovery in 2020 they go down six per six six point six percent in 2021 they're still going down they're worse off in 2021 than they were in 2020 whereas the fourth quint quintile had a bit of an improvement and the richest 20 had quite a significant improvement and but between these are the bottom these two are the bottom 20 and the bottom the next one up the bottom 40 had either no recovery in 2021 or they went down in 2021 so what happens in when we think of like a disaster drought Somalia northeast Kenya when you're a pastorless family and you have a drought what we want to do is maintain your livelihoods so that you don't sell off your flock once you sell off your flock you're done you're going to go into the town and you're never coming back probably you just have lost all your assets and I think also in the case you're just not going to be able to rebuild that herd and I think in the case of urban informal sector including in the U.S. the not the working non the working poor are the ones who had to shed assets or forego other things to make ends meet fairly well and we're still seeing that now as the as the extra funding has stopped and that's just a trap that's real hard to get real hard to get out of so then we look at what's coming and this is just a tragedy so this is in the current sustainable development goals the goal is to reduce it in half by or eradicated by 2030 in 2030 we will end up most likely uh I think in a somewhat optimistic scenario we will end up where we were in 2015 this nobody expected that we would end up at the end of the sustainable development goal period where we started you know maybe slow slower progress than we were thinking with a dip during COVID but to go over that sustainable development goal period without any progress this calls for a renewed attention we ought to think about this and understand what's happening okay then just very quickly and this is too much information to look at but I thought the visual would be good when you look at the economic or the humanitarian crises we also since about 2015 2016 have come up with a system for let's say agreeing on how bad different crises are so is the crisis in Sudan worse than the crisis in South Sudan or in Somalia and how do you know and how do you compare so if you're a donor uh and you want to give humanitarian money where do you give it if you want to give it where the worst need is so there are 17 agencies that get together and share their data along a set of criteria that range from kind of the severity of the crisis that are classified in five phases first one none marginal nobody talks about phase one phase two is stressed you have to kind of pay attention but really what we're looking at is phase three four and five that ends in phase five ends in catastrophe and famine phase four emergency is really bad and phase three crisis is also bad it's not like oh we have to prepare uh the phase three you're in you're in need of a lot of humanitarian assistance phase four more extreme phase five famine and when you look at and this comes out every year we keep track of it as we go I think it's a real advance in that when you look at at the latest report for 2022 these are the number of people that are in phase three crisis are above according to the primary driver of that crisis and you see normally in 2018 uh onward uh conflict and insecurity is the biggie right you've got 21 countries 73 million economic shocks 10 10 million you get up here and now you've got for economic shocks you got 27 countries that are in where the main driver of their humanitarian crisis is economic and it's just something that we haven't seen before and the numbers of course go up all the time this is when you look at this slide against a lot of information but you can see in the various phases the only one that kind of bounces around is phase five in uh uh famine and catastrophe because you don't always have famine in a given year we had a lot more in 2021 not very much in some of the other other years but when you look at like phase two and phase three they're really moving up and uh phase four not so much but it's this group here that is really vulnerable and I think that's what we are seeing also with this uh with these reasons for these reasons and then just a couple of final slides on this so if you look at kind of what's behind this this is a graph on from UN high commission on refugees number of displaced people worldwide you know we didn't think that things were good between 1990 and 2010 I wouldn't have guessed that they were flat but from 2010 onward you know we're talking pretty steep shift here and that's you know refugees and I think it includes I think it includes I don't think it includes internally displaced people when you look at extreme weather events likewise it's you know it's just shooting up and especially with flooding which is clearly consequence of climate change similarly droughts are somewhat more let's say up and down but the extreme weather events as a con as a let's say an indicator of or a consequence of climate change are the ones that are really shooting up so the maybe one final point on this is that that I mentioned earlier on women women suffered the most and this is I know not a surprise probably to anybody but the difference between the severe and moderate food insecurity before and after COVID was really stark and women suffered the most for obvious reasons I think you know for what they had to the extra burden that they had loss of income and other things and their their situation became much worse it is not by any means all bleak in what countries did to respond to this uh India for example has a relatively new program where everybody in the country every single person has a bank account that the government can send electronically money to and 85 percent of rural households got money and 46 percent of urban households got money brazil which had since lula's time big social protection program ramped that up and their level of severe poverty below that's below the equivalent of two dollars and 15 cents a day actually went down during COVID because of that additional supplemental income along the lines that we know here from from from the US so we've got to deal with this a lot of what we thought we knew is still correct we need women's economic empowerment we need economic development we need economic growth we need pro-poor growth we need pro-poor policies we have to deal with climate change all the things that we knew it isn't like we were doing the wrong things I think we were actually doing the right things but it wasn't enough and we never thought it was enough but we didn't think it would be so much not enough that we would not have made any progress from during the sustainable development goals so it you know I think almost everybody I think who works in kind of the development sphere is an optimist right because you know you just see progress and you want to be optimistic and if you're not optimistic you know you you don't do what's going to go but this is a challenge even for optimists this is a really severe challenge that will get worse because of climate change and because of the economic impact that continues to ripple through including in the US for the families that Dana mentioned as it as it will elsewhere and we see the rise of conflict that well we thought was bad before is in fact on the increase and on top of that also I didn't mention inflation in Ukraine but the inflation impact mostly of COVID that we see in this country and in some countries the impact of food supply from if they were big importers from Ukraine also had an impact and the cost of food going up can only be another disaster so you know we remain I think certainly convinced that we can address this but it's going to take renewed urgency it's going to take new urgency and I'm delighted that I could share these with you I'm really pleased to be here and meet meet everybody that I've met so far and thank you for coming and I think we have time for questions where's Allison do we have question time yeah thank you very much for for your your information and all the graphs and whatnot recently I was reading about something else has really caught my attention and it has to do with agricultural how we're growing things and the fact that actually the nutrient value of some of our foods is actually going down and in some it's it's almost 20% and so is this something that is coming into the equation you know particularly you know iron or protein and like in rice and things like that so I wonder if you could speak about that yes the and I hope this won't become a casualty of this of the numbers that I've shown there but while things were improving there was an emphasis which there always should have been on healthy diets and because what we measure in the prevalence of undernourishment is just calories right are there enough calories to kind of keep alive essentially but obviously not enough so we need to have healthy diets and three billion people in the world can't afford healthy diets and the cost of a healthy diet including in the US is real high and it's gone up a lot the stuff that is healthiest is I think the pieces are the parts of the food shopping cart that have become most expensive and I know all of us see that so the idea of healthy diets I think has to be maintained as a way of addressing the whole picture and I don't know that globally we're seeing a decrease in the nutrient content of food I suspect a lot of hot house tomatoes are very nutritious for example but in any case the issue of nutritious food is that people can't afford it on a massive scale three billion people cannot afford don't make enough money to afford a healthy diet and that has to be part of the equation even though kind of the dramatic increase that we see is really about basic calories thank you so much David Plum here I was commenting with Abigail here that it's little daunting to look at those statistics right it leaves you a little depressed and so I'm wondering what little anecdotes of hopeful vision might you leave us with tonight to lift our spirits that while it is extraordinarily daunting there are pathways you mentioned Brazil you mentioned some other but I'd be interested to hear those usually that's the message you know I mean population growth will level off as countries get wealthier girls go to school in particular population growth drops Bangladesh for example has done a tremendous job in reducing in improving nutrition reducing hunger when I lived in India we used to talk about the South Asia enigma that you know how can it be that with India and the rest of South Asia developing really quite quickly if it weren't for China we would have thought India was a powerhouse but their nutrition numbers just didn't go anywhere and then here's Bangladesh who you know made huge strides by making it a priority and the countries that have made it a priority have done really well and I think that we will see also with the increase in conflict in places that aren't used to conflict I mean let's say Sudan is for example and Ethiopia I don't know but other places other governments and it's mainly almost almost entirely up to governments and to put in policies and local communities local NGOs that do the work but when the country is committed to reducing hunger it happens and that was the lesson from 2000 to 2010 and I think how that works is not so complicated I think you know with social protection like Brazil with income support with emphasis on small farmers women's empowerment lots of things when you are serious training Bangladesh lots of other places when you're serious about reducing hunger it's reduced I think so I think that we will see again a realization that this is not something that's going to improve under the current circumstances without a lot more attention and I think there was an expectation that the attention that we were seeing between 2000 and 2010 would continue to lower that curve of the Latin Americans you know what about the other half we have to deal with them so their expectation and they weren't let's say overly optimistic they really thought they could do this and they got real close and then they just have a huge setback and the setback is more difficult now because of climate change and the economic impact that continues to roll through the economies but the lesson is when countries give it a priority hunger goes down and I'm sure that that will come back and I think it's the realization not that it's gone but I think it will come back the realization will come that it's going to take a lot more than what they thought was necessary earlier so I am actually optimistic contrary to what it sounded like but I think we will get back on track but getting back on track will take us to where we started in 2015 and that's really unfortunate so Paul have here one question we saw on your graphs how shocks global shocks like COVID can dramatically impact food security so we know that shocks are a given other shocks are likely to come what can we do to make our food security more resilient and sustainable and lasting right no it's a great comment and a great message and a key and I'm sure it was part of adras policy too right to let's say to maintain livelihoods and to be preparedness for what you know is coming and when I started to work more on kind of the emergency side when I was living in Kenya it was a shock to me when you would get the next drought it was like everybody was inventing the wheel again like this hadn't happened before you know it's happened before it was only a few years ago so how do you prepare communities to deal with that ahead of time and when it happens what do you do to keep their livelihoods going so that they don't become destitute and then they're not going to go they're never going to recover and that I think is the is the key on this and I think likewise as we see more drought more floods more severe weather events there's just going to have to be a lot more attention and a lot more development assistance loans in particular to put those systems in place we're much better at early warning than we were before we're much better in protecting livelihoods than we were before the humanitarian community has come a long way but we're going to need funding to do that and I think that's that's the way it has to be thank you Daniel and and while it is perhaps the best word is sobering perhaps those sobering is better than depressing I would say thanks Daniel and thanks Dana for both of your presentations you know hunger does stretch right here from Maine to the world it's here it's everywhere for folks who don't know me I'm David Plumb I'll be the incoming president here at the board of the world affairs council of Maine very pleased about that and seeing more of all of you in the coming year and years I want to thank folks for coming tonight to our annual gathering to hear this talk we've spent I think five events now looking at hunger from different angles and I think it's been a wise choice it's such an important issue and we're going to be trying in the world affairs council to be focused on critical issues like this and really galvanize attention here in Maine and elsewhere so stay tuned we look to do good things this year I want to thank everyone that helped make this possible so I need to read this so I don't forget names particularly the host committee which was named earlier thank you everybody and Jackie and everyone for making this possible really appreciate that we have sponsors cmp verral and vertical harvest we really thank them of course Hannaford is our event patron and we're here in Hannaford Hall so it all comes together doesn't it so we really are thankful for that and Jackie a special shout out to you for taking on this planning and we really appreciate that we've had interns we've have all kinds of people helping out Maddie Morrison Anna Wallace Joyce as always just jang very helpful Dory French and Nat Whitney everybody rolled up their sleeves to try to pull together an evening so I want to say thanks to all of you