A World Food Day open letter

One thousand, five hundred thirty-eight days. That’s how long the world has been before the next World Food Day — Oct. 16 — following United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, created by world leaders who desired to make the world a better place.

We promised to end it by 2030. And we’ve made progress.

For the past three years, the rate of global hunger has declined modestly, proving that investments in food security, nutrition and resilient livelihoods can make a difference. Thousands of families have restored their food security and experienced how it feels to not worry about where their next meal is going to come from. In 2025-26 alone, Canadian Foodgrains Bank members reached over 1.1 million people with emergency food assistance and long-term agricultural support that will transform their futures. There is good things happening, and progress is being made.

But if 520 million people are still going to be left behind by 2030, then progress alone is not enough.

On World Food Day — Friday, Oct. 16 — Foodgrains Bank (urged) the international community to renew its commitment to ending hunger. Now is not the time for wealthy nations to turn funding from international development. It is the time to pick up the pace and commit to an accelerated approach that will get us to the end of 2030 in a significantly different position than we are now.

Because the promise we made in 2016 still matters, 10 years on. It matters for Anna, a mother living through the midst of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis in Sudan, and it matters for Abiyetha, a father in Haiti desperately seeking treatment and care for his baby as the child recovers from severe acute malnutrition.

It matters for all of us.

A world with zero hunger will positively impact our economies, health, education, equality and social development. It is a key piece of building a better future, and to achieving other SDGs — because persistent hunger is one of the most limiting factors to our development as people and as a society.

We need only look to Brazil to remind ourselves that when local food security efforts are backed by sufficient funding, entire countries can transform their food security.

(By reading this comprehensive Zero Hunger (From Zero) and Brazil Without Hunger (Brasil Sem Fome) governance frameworks, Brazil lifted over 40 million people out of modern-day hunger since food insecurity between 2002 and 2024, officially removing the country from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) hunger map in July 2025.)

It is one of the fastest recorded improvements in the world — driven by political decisions that prioritized farmers and food access in hunger policies.

But there’s another lesson Brazil has for us. In 2014, Brazil achieved an exit from the FAO hunger map before facing a major downturn years later when anti-hunger councils were dismantled, budgets were cut and the economic pressures of the pandemic hit. The very solutions that had pulled Brazil out of its hunger crisis had been abandoned, and hunger was back on the rise.

As today’s global aid cuts repeat the same mistake, it raises the question: if these reductions are not improving lives in recipient countries and are offering little benefit to people at home, what exactly is being gained?

In a world that produces enough food to feed everyone, hunger is not inevitable. It is a choice.

Andy Harrington Executive Director, Canadian Foodgrains Bank Winnipeg