Kriegen wir alle Menschen satt? – Pause mit Martin Frick vom Welternährungsprogramm

[Music] Our current food system is not necessarily built on this, actually everyone is allowed to sit down. [Music] And the children are hungry in Africa. Hi, I'm Paul. And I haven't eaten my plate until today. Of course, it makes sense to pay attention to the fact that people are different from where they are privileged and throw away food in large quantities. But like mine, a dried-up potato bar that is supposed to help the hungry in the Sub-Saharan, I have never been able to do it. But today I am going to ask Martin Frick. He is mainly busy with hunger. Frick leads the German-speaking division of the World Food Program of the United Nations, also known as WFP. I visited him in his office in Berlin. From the window you can see an ironic large field of Kentucky Fried Chicken. And Frick explained to me how the global food system is built up, why, above all, people are hungry who produce food themselves. And how you can create this system, which is one of the biggest climbers in the world today, to the growing world population. [Music] Mr. Frick, my name today would be to put the hunger in the act. And I thought maybe I would pull the end all the way to the beginning. Is there theoretically enough food global to get all the people's attention? So a very loud year. A loud year is good. Nevertheless, I have read that the number of hungry has now increased a few years in a row. Now, of course, I imagine as a layman that such large food companies are actually relatively light, even in the most remote corners of the earth, and there the food that is obviously available. Why is the number of hungry then rising? So we have actually seen three factors in the last few years. The first is war. We have twice as many armed conflicts as 10 years ago. In mid-February 2022, the three prices have just exploded. And this leap has been very massive with the war against Russia against the Ukrainians. This has now calmed down a little bit, but war is still the biggest driver of hunger. The second driver is the Covid crisis, which has now appeared to be far beyond. But it has caused dozens of countries, especially in developing countries, in deep debt. And these debts are making sure that many local currencies have drastically lost value across the US dollar. And the prices on the world markets are still about 30% higher than in 2019. And in the end, this means that more and more families can no longer afford basic food. And the third reason is climate change. For example, in the Horn of Africa, we have now fallen out of six rainy times. Six times no rain. And as a result of this, 22 million people who are directly affected by hunger. Now I ask you why the number of hungry is rising again and reading very different numbers. Something between 300, it goes up to 820 million, I think. I imagine it's hard for me to count hungry. How do you get to these numbers? We have everything between 2 billion and 350 million. 2 billion are those who are closer to failure. And that includes, for example, the now almost 1 billion people who are heavily overweight. When we talk about hunger now, then we distinguish chronic hunger and acute hunger. Chronic is when people are constantly not getting as much food as they need. And above all, not in quality, for example, nutrients, vitamins and so on. The number is actually about 828 million. What we look at as world food programs are those at which it is really very critical. So acute hunger is suffering now. And there we were in 2019 with 135 million people and today with 350 million people. And this is being evaluated independently. There are experts in it. And in these numbers, too, of course, there is uncertainty. Because we also work strongly with the reports of the government and there are some countries that don't report. Are there people who are particularly affected by hunger? Well, the women and the children who are most affected by hunger are overproportional. And it is ironic that in areas that are now strongly affected by hunger, i.e. sub-saharan Africa, it is mainly the women who operate the agriculture at the same time. So 80% of those who are worldwide hungry are actually food producers. That is already cynical. That is absurd, yes. So women, children, land populations... Then the population and what we often forget very often, people with disabilities. How does that come about? Well, they can often not be so active. They have difficulties in self-employment. Where hunger comes through poverty again? Hunger is directly a consequence of poverty. There is actually almost no opponent in the world in which you cannot buy food if you have the money. Even in Germany there is hunger, Martin Frick has told me. In any case, many mistakes have been made. Due to inflation it has become even more difficult for many low-income people to eat. Frick works with the World Food Program in more than 80 countries. Food insecurity is a global problem. And the World Food Program is the world's largest organization that works against it. The work is financed exclusively by donations from companies, private persons and governments. It is not dangerous in many places. Over the years, employees have been led or even killed. In 2020, the WFP won the Nobel Peace Prize for its use in conflict areas. Once again, about the role of the World Food Program. You said before, you have to do with the acute hunger. I imagine the WFP in the respective areas especially as a means of disaster relief. So driving, bringing food with you, bringing money with you. Or is it also structural political work for the areas of use? We do both. On the one hand, we want to establish food security as a basis. We call it changing lives. But at the same time, food security is also used in humanitarian crises, which we call as saving lives. And at the moment, there are so many crises that we actually deal with about three quarters with humanitarian aid and with one quarter with the production of food security on the ground. And that is a area where we have to grow very simply to prevent the number of those who need humanitarian aid to increase further, because that would no longer be possible. Practical question. Where will the WFP get the food that is brought there? Will it be bad for 30,000 breads and 50 tons of corn to drive into the metro? We have a whole sales department. There are over 60 people who make sure that we buy cheap food, that we buy reliable food for the second time. We can't afford to tear down the supply line and that we also buy appropriate food. We also have to put together food baskets that are appropriate and suitable for people. The exciting thing is that we work more and more with direct cash transfers. Through Blockchain and mobile banking, we have the opportunity to make real money and send money directly to many cases via mobile. Or, if needed, with very normal bank cards, where you can then buy basic food from a whole series of shops. Of course, it also helps to ensure that local markets and local producers also have a benefit when we support people. And last but not least, it also has a lot to do with human dignity. So if you imagine that you are a refugee in a foreign country, when you can then go to the market with money, it is a completely different perception than if you have to bet on food in principle. Exactly. And it seems to me that this global food system is not designed to satisfy the needs of all people at the same time. Who uses the system at the moment? Who gets the money out of it? Who ensures their products? For whom is the system designed and implemented? Well, there is the assumption that someone wants to make a certain design. I think what we see is that the current food system is essentially based on markets. And markets sell what can be sold. And of course, there is always pressure to produce as cheaply as possible and to trade as much space as possible so that you can make business. But on the other hand, there are people who simply cannot participate in this global market, which we will partly buy out of there. Here is Martin Frick diplomatically, because of course, companies that sell pesticides, pigments, wheat or wheat, sell billions of them from the food system. But Frick is ashamed to introduce them here as evil capitalists, because exactly these companies could be designed tomorrow to help the WFP with donations. And today's food system was really a promise that no one would have to be hungry anymore. Because after the Second World War, the food production changed. New plant methods, fertilizers, pesticides and machines took everything out of the soil that existed. More wheat, more fruits, vegetables, more meat than ever before. And above all, much more than people could eat. A real slaughterhouse country. At the end of the 1960s, you even spoke of a green revolution. Only these production increases showed their disadvantages. Because the more farmers were able to build, the faster the prices fell. In order to compensate for the missing income, they had to produce even more, which pushed the prices back and so on. In Teufelskreis and for most small farmers, a real disaster, many against pleids. The big companies jumped in thanks to them. They flooded the global market with their greed and made poor countries dependent on food import. So one has to say that the green revolution and the world trade have made the food system more resistant and richer, but also created new dependencies. They make poor countries sensitive to price fluctuations, climate events and wars in Ukraine. I asked Martin Frick where to stabilize this system today. In the first line, food waste. In rich countries we have about 36% of food waste. Food waste will never be zero. No person can plan it in such a way. But with a choice that will be ready until the last moment, we are also in a culture that is very, very wasteful. The second inefficiency is that we, paradoxically, are losing about the same amount of food in the poorest countries of the world. Not because people are wasting it, but because simple methods for food processing are missing, because cooling chains are not available, because sometimes streets are so broken that what has been built cannot find the way to the markets and families. And then we also have to look at how we actually deal with our food principles. So in Germany, or in other rich EU countries, three quarters of land are not on the plate, but they land in feed, as food, or they land in the auto tank as biotribe. We already have three big inefficiencies that can be addressed. And globally, we have become extremely dependent on very, very few varieties. Weizen, maize, rice dominate our world market. We have 60% of the calories we lose from these three varieties. And that is not right. As far as there are many countries that have their own food culture, which are not only culturally adapted, but also from the diet, which are more nutrient-rich, for example, linsen in India or Hirse in West Africa, and which are also more ecologically adapted, because they need much less water, because they drain much less soil. And we definitely have to make sure that we produce a much more diversified food supply and also season it. A bit of a naive question. Could one in this world trade, which essentially replaces the diet system completely with local production? No, and you don't have to. I am a passionate coffee drinker. If we only produce and consume local coffee, we would only give me a third cup of coffee. I think that is a big loss. But what is actually more important? Producing things so that they are exported to other countries, where it is not bad, but where too often too many bad prices are paid, or more own production for their own consumption. We sit in my office, I look around, and there are large images of women building food supplies in the south. They have to be built very carefully. And also in many parts of the world. We are taught. We are always presented by people who have learned this from their mother and father. But in many parts of the world, we have to do this with people who are stranded somewhere on a piece of land and no longer know how to actually do it. And to restore this knowledge, to restore land, to restore ecological circles, to bring them to the edge again, that would already bring a lot. Because if you understand nutrition as a system, you are at almost 40% of the climate problem. And if you read these reports of the world climate council, it is required that we, coal and dioxide, have to reconnect from the atmosphere. So there are high-tech ideas on how something like this could work. But the easiest way is to work for 3.5 billion years. And this is called photosynthesis. And the photosynthesis manager of this planet are only the people who operate the landscape. And that is something I really fight for. That we, the poorest people in the world, would like to keep in mind and also pay for it, that they change their landscape so that it is a climate-positive landscape. And then this whole issue of nutrition can become one of the main drivers of the climate crisis, one of the biggest hope-bearers. Mr. Frick, thank you very much for your time. [Music]