This year’s World Food Day marks 80 years since the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, whose mandate from the outset has been to ensure humanity’s freedom from want.

Today, around 8.2 percent of people worldwide face chronic undernourishment. That compares to roughly two-thirds of the population living in areas with inadequate food supply in 1946, as revealed by the first World Food Survey conducted by FAO in the first months of its existence. Moreover, in 2025, with a threefold increase in population, the world produces more than enough calories to feed everyone.

As we mark this day and reflect on challenges past, present and future, I am reminded of one conclusion from that long-ago survey: “The choice is between going forward and going backward.”

The FAO and its member countries have achieved a lot: Eliminating the rinderpest virus, establishing the Codex Alimentarius food safety standards, nearly tripling global rice yields since setting up the International Rice Commission in the late 1940s, negotiating international treaties on fisheries practices and genetic resources, setting up early-warning monitoring schemes to mitigate the risk of pests and plant and animal diseases, establishing and hosting the Agricultural Market Information System to support trade, and the development of........

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