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.