Compounding Crises and their Collective Impact on Global Food Security

The Covid-19 pandemic was a major setback for the path toward eradicating world hunger. Now, climate change, water scarcity, population growth, and multiple conflicts around the globe, such as the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, are making it difficult for the global community to get back on track. Availability and access to nutritious food are in jeopardy. Although Africa remains the worst affected region, many families in Europe and the United States struggle to afford a nutritious diet faced with high inflation and continued supply chain disruptions.

On December 13, 1014 and the American Council on Germany will revisit the topic of food security in their virtual series Resilience & Adaptation 2.0. Join us for a discussion with Ambassador Ertharin Cousin, CEO and Managing Director of Food Systems for the Future and former Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program, and Alexander Müller, Managing Director of TMG Think Tank for Sustainability.

Ambassador Ertharin Cousin currently serves as the CEO and Managing Director of Food Systems for the Future, a nutrition impact investment fund; a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; a Bosch Academy, Robert Weizsäcker Fellow; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University, Center on Food Security and Environment.

From 2012 until 2017, she led the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). As Executive Director, Ambassador Cousin guided the 14,000-member WFP team, feeding more than 80 million people each year while she identified and championed longer-term, more sustainable solutions for global food insecurity and hunger.

In 2009, Ambassador Cousin was nominated and confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. Prior to her global hunger work, she helped lead the U.S. domestic fight to end hunger including service as the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of America’s Second Harvest -now Feeding America. She is currently a member of the Bayer AG Supervisory Board, the Mondelez International Board of Directors, the Royal DSM Sustainability Board, and a Trustee of the African agriculture thinktank Academia2063.

She is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Georgia Law School, and the University of Chicago Executive Management Program-Finance for Non-Financial Executives. She has been listed numerous times on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women List, as the Fortune Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink, on Time’s 100 Most Influential People list, and as one of the 500 Most Powerful People on the Planet by Foreign Policy magazine.

Alexander Müller is the Founder and Managing Director of TMG – Think Tank for Sustainability in Berlin and Study Leader of “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Agriculture and Food (TEEBAgriFood)” hosted by UN Environment. He is a Member of the German Council for Sustainability.

Previously, he served as the Assistant-Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) from 2006 to 2013, as a member of the UN Advisory Group on Energy and Climate Change (AGECC), and as chair of the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition (UNSCN). In Germany, he served as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry for Consumer Protection, Food, and Agriculture from 2001 to 2005, and as State Secretary in the Ministry of Youth, Family Affairs, and Health in the state of Hesse, among others.

Mr. Müller received a diploma in sociology at the Philipps-University in Marburg.