If we don't act fast to help smallholder farmers, developing world might soon run low on food

Ertharin Cousin, former head of the UN's World Food Programme, doesn't like when people talk about the handoff between humanitarian response and development response.

Why? Because that imperils those caught in between the two, such as smallholder farmers who barely survived the pandemic and are now struggling with the global food price crisis, she explained in a livestream discussion, "Hunger Pains: The growing global food crisis," presented by GZERO Media in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Cousin says we must meet what she refers to as the "midterm" challenges so months from now we don't transition from "a food affordability crisis to a food availability crisis."

That's no exaggeration, she adds, because 80% of the food consumed in the developing world is affected by what smallholder farmers are going through today.