Celebrated in over 150 countries around the world, this year’s edition of World Food Day marked the 75th anniversary of the foundation of FAO. With the theme “Grow, nourish, sustain. Together. Our actions are our future”, #WorldFoodDay engaged audiences across borders, sectors and generations as it called to accelerate action towards building more resilient and robust agri-food systems, and for global solidarity - vital for our recovery from this crisis and building back better to end hunger and malnutrition in all its forms. 

FAO and its partners also honoured food heroes on the occasion, who - despite all difficulties - continue to provide food to their communities and beyond. Various events and activities urged everyone to show gratitude for the food we eat and the people who produce, plant, harvest, fish or transport it. 

Falling in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, this was no ordinary World Food Day,. While initially it seemed that the campaign would be low profile compared with other years, COVID-19 plunged many, including international organizations like FAO, further into the digital age and outreach activities and events around the world quickly adapted to this trend. 

2020 marked the first-ever virtual celebration in Rome meaning that the global ceremony and the special video mapping shows at the Colosseum and FAO headquarters welcomed a large number of participants and new target audiences. Over 76 000 participants joined the events via Zoom webinar, webcast, or live streaming on social media and a live feed was distributed to over 200 TV broadcasters worldwide bringing the events to millions more. Initial usage detection shows the events were covered on TV channels including Spain’s Canal 24 Horas, TVE Internacional and TVE La 1; Italy’s RAI News 24, RAI Uno and RAI 3; DW-TV Arabic, Belarus 1, Al Aoula Morocco, RTP 3 Portugal, 8TV Malaysia, and China’s Xinhua and CCTV.

The World Food Day theme, messages and visual were used consistently in over 30 languages for over 400 events in up to 150 countries, across the world. 5 520 articles were tracked from 12-20 October (this covers only 9 languages), an increase of over 50% from 2019, and FAO’s radio PSAs were broadcast on radio stations in over 30 countries. The total social media reach throughout the week of World Food Day was over 1.5 billion accounts on social media, a 300% increase from 2019 and over 860 000 users visited web pages dedicated to the campaign on fao.org.

Major accounts such as @CGTN (110.3M followers), Prime Minister of India (63M followers), CNN Arabic (11.9M followers) @Pontifix (18.7M followers) and influencers across the world demonstrated their support to #WorldFoodDay, #FoodHeroes and FAO, like Gisele (16.4M followers), Matbakh Sooka (over 5.8M followers), Chef Elijah and Paolo Nespoli (326k followers) posted World Food Day material on social media. 

Despite the challenging circumstances, pro-bono advertising on city billboards or landmarks, public transport and entertainment venues matched the number of activities in 2019, achieving high visibility and engagement with the general public worth millions of dollars. Highlights included lighting or video projections on city landmarks worldwide such as the Tour Maroc Télécom in Rabat, the second tallest building in Morocco; billboards in Brussels in collaboration with JC Decaux Benelux as well as advertising in Belgian trains and cinemas nationwide; cinema halls in Tajikistan; Mexico City metro, airport and nationwide bus networks, radio and TV; digital billboards in Jakarta and Dhaka; billboards in Juba plus radio stations throughout 15 African countries; and, the famous landmark of Times Square in New York, thanks to the support of LG Electronics Group.

Frequent internal communication on various channels with 130 FAO offices and Member States was key to achieving a global impact, as multilingual content, messages and visuals were shared for the successful roll-out of local or regional campaigns. 

World Food Day’s success was again the result of a team effort by colleagues, governments and partners worldwide. Together we managed to build on the last year’s success despite remote working and national lockdowns.

See photo highlights of events around the world at this link.