Josette Sheeran
Eleventh Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme, a position she assumed in April 2007.
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I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more. No more are we going to accept this." And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more.
I am in the hunger business; it is what we do exclusively, 24/7, and I am sorry to tell you that business is booming.
A silent tsunami which knows no borders is sweeping the world.
If any good comes out of the current famine in the Horn of Africa — amidst the pictures of mothers carrying dying babies at their shrivelled breasts and hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies and matchstick limbs — it will be galvanising the world on the need to ensure access to nutritious food for the world’s most vulnerable people.
Josette Sheeran, executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme, stated that people who don't have food have three choices – "revolt, migrate or die". "We need a better plan," she said, pointing to the one in seven people who are food insecure. 70% of brain growth takes place before the age of two so deprivation of food in infants is long-lasting.
With climate change and health crises rightfully receiving international attention, the time has come to focus on hunger as a top priority. WHO regards hunger and malnutrition as the gravest threat to public health, and climate change threatens to further destabilise already fragile food-production systems.
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