The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation s report was released late on Monday India time, and showed that the pandemic has had an impact on progress towards the UN sustainable development goals, with almost all being off track. nbsp;The report also touched upon the food crisis and the climate crisis, two issues that pose a significant challenge to policymakers. nbsp;Ahead of the release, Bill Gates spoke to Hindustan Times on how he sees the response to these challenges evolving. nbsp;Edited excerpts:Do you think the pandemic has intensified the food crisis That the disruptions caused, largely on account of the pandemic, make it difficult for countries that were not self sufficient in terms of their own food production Well, the number of people in hunger today you know, this CARE report talked about it going up to 800 million, and they also highlighted that this was particularly acute for women, actually a pretty big imbalance where women and children are suffering the most. 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.One of the things that s becoming clear is that, given what s happening with the climate crisis, there has to be a change in how people farm.
It s becoming clear that the primary focus has to be on science, right I mean, we need to find climate resistant seeds, we need to find techniques to offset the impact in some way. How far down that road do you think we are Well, the system that creates new seeds, public domain seeds is called the CG system the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research and sadly, we ve gotten complacent about food availability, and so the world has been underfunding that CG system. Now we re trying to get that increased, particularly as people realize the climate induced challenges.In India, you have Department of Biotechnology, and Department of Agriculture that s helping look at seed innovation, making sure that we do the right things for Indian farmers even in the face of climate change. And monsoon variability sadly, is going up quite a bit.We also need better advice to farmers. The foundation helped fund a Digital Green effort, where you use digital platforms to have farmers share advice with each other, and that s been quite successful to scale up new practices, because as you said, if you just stick with the traditional way you ve done farming, where farmers are conservative, that s very common, and they won t be adapted to the changes they need to make.And so, although it starts with seeds, the advice system and the credit system all need to get engaged so that, ideally, India stays self sufficient in food, and Africa is a huge net food importer, which is kind of tragic.
They should actually be a net food exporter if they d get modern seeds and good advice.Some scientists have always been saying this, but I think there has been greater realization among many others who are not in climate science, that whatever our models predicted, the change is coming faster, which probably means that we have underestimated this problem of the climate crisis to a very, very significant extent. Do you think we are doing enough What are the one or two things you d like to see countries change in how they approach this Well, with climate, we have climate adaptation, and the key thing there is investing in these seed and livestock systems. And so, I d put top of the list that we re underinvesting in that. We need to use all the innovation possible, and we need to invest more in it. For climate mitigation, that s going to take decades, of course, to get the emissions to zero. And the realization that the closer you are to the equator, the more of these absolute temperatures are going to make farm productivity and outdoor work more difficult, that s clear with these various heat waves that we ve seen.And so, the voice of India and other countries that are near the equator in the climate discussion, I think, is increasingly important.
A lot of the climate activism comes from temperate regions, which will also suffer, but not as much. And so, you get the irony that the emissions are mostly from the richer, temperate zone countries, and yet the early suffering is very heavily in the more tropical countries that are not as responsible for the emissions. And so, India and Africa do face these challenges, and they need the world to cooperate with them and help drive those innovations, as well as go as fast as we can on the emissions reduction, which is called climate mitigation.
