FAO General Statement at the 2024 Humanitarian Affairs Segment

Thank you, Vice President, 

Today, the world appears to be ricocheting from crisis to crisis. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 already feels like it is going in the same direction. Historic drought in Southern Africa has replaced once-in-a-generation drought in East Africa. Floods and extreme heat events have been recorded across the globe.  

Conflicts are intensifying and spilling over regions, aggravating economic instability, driving staggeringly high humanitarian needs, the most extreme forms of hunger and pushing record numbers of people from their homes.  

The world’s most vulnerable are even more exposed and falling furthest behind.  

Women and girls are particularly impacted. A recent FAO report showed that heat stress alone widens the income gap between female- and male-headed households by USD 37 billion a year. 

But when empowered, when we give women and girls the same opportunity as men and boys to have a say in their own lives, and the resources and services to make their own choices, we can reduce high levels of acute food insecurity and malnutrition and build resilient agrifood systems.  

Today, across the humanitarian system we are under severe pressure – dealing with both spreading and intensifying needs on one hand and tightening budgets on the other. 

Affected people are increasingly difficult to access, making their own production all the more important.   

FAO firmly believes that we must be far more proactive in reducing needs.  

That means better mitigating the impact of crises by linking early warning with scaled up anticipatory actions.  

It means life-saving actions that also contribute to reducing needs, such as emergency agriculture, which helps people to meet their own needs. 

And it means massively scaled up investments in resilience.  

Throughout all, we must be guided by the priorities of people affected by and at risk of crises.  

We must not simply ask, we must actively listen and take action based on their experiences, not our preconceived “drop-down menus” of assistance. And funds must follow these priorities.  

Agrifood systems offer an enormous opportunity – to meet immediate needs in times of crisis, to prevent and reduce the impacts of those crises, to build resilience and to empower people to make their own way out of crises – today and in the future.  

Thank you.