'The world’s food system is broken and is not serving its population well'

They are needed because the world’s food system is broken and not serving its population well, said one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject.

Professor Jose Graziano da Silva, Director of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation from 2012 to 2019, was speaking at a Feed Beacon event staged by Nottingham University.

That disfunction was best exemplified by the fact that 820 million people were starving, while 830 million people were obese, and a further two billion people over-weight.

The irony was that the world produced enough food, but 30 pr cent of it was wasted, mostly in harvesting, storage and transport.

Prof da Silva led Brazil’s Zero Hunger programme, a scheme he suggested might provide a template for other countries.

Under it, schools and public institutions committed to buying a portion of their food from local suppliers:

“In some schools the children of farmers were eating the food their own family had grown."

He suggested many of the solutions lay in the cities where the majority of people lived and food was eaten: