Shorouk Express
MILAN, Italy, May 7. Regional cooperation is
essential for the resilience of food supply chains amid climate
change challenges, F. Cleo Kawawaki, ADB Director General, Sectors
Department 2 (which manages operations for the agriculture, food,
nature, rural development, water, urban development, and digital
sectors), said, Trend’s special correspondent reports from
Milan.
She was addressing the panel discussions on Cultivating a
Sustainable Tomorrow: Building Inclusive and Resilient Food
Systems, held as part of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Asian
Development Bank.
Kawawaki noted that with the challenges of climate change, there
is a greater need to concentrate because supply chains can be
disrupted.
“We need to have new supply chains as well. But the resilience
of the supply chain depends on how the region can be integrated
together so that challenges can be met together. I think one of our
biggest announcements was our ambition of $40 billion in
investments in food system transformation by 2030. It gives more
confidence that ADB is committed and that there will be finance
available. And 27% of that will go to the private sector,” she
said.
Kawawaki noted that this has become a very uncertain world.
“And in terms of the system, the biggest challenge that we’re
facing is climate change. How do we make food systems transform
into a climate-resilient system? We can do that much better with
regional cooperation. That’s one of the monitors of ADB.
We’re looking at that and looking at the risk from all of the
sides of finance as well as policy, as well as making the projects
compatible with blended finance through that lens of regional
cooperation and resilience,” the director general noted.
She noted that investment in food systems is an investment in
the most precious resource, people.
“If you prevent malnutrition, you’re going to have much more
productive human beings and have the people reach their maximum,
optimize their maximum potential rather than they’ll not be able to
study in school because of their lack of nutrition they had in the
first thousand days. So, I mean, for the growth of a nation, I
think nutrition is extremely important and the availability of food
on the private sector is extremely important because if it’s not
available, it’s not done,” Kawawaki said.
