The President's Blog

Today, the White House holds a conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. The goal of the conference is to “end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.” The World Food Prize Foundation is committed to ending hunger by 2030 and supports the efforts by the White House to galvanize partners towards this shared goal. 

This is the second ever White House conference focused on hunger. The first conference in 1969, served as a catalyst for improving hunger and health in the United States of America. From the conference there were over 1,800 policy recommendations that became enacted, including the creation of dietary guidelines, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (known as WIC), and the National School Lunch Program. We are hopeful that recommendations from this year’s conference will have a similar impact.

Leading up to today’s conference, the White House encouraged anti-hunger organizations to engage their communities and host listening sessions to hear how hunger and diet-related diseases have impacted their communities. The World Food Prize Foundation conducted four listening sessions this summer with our partners. We engaged students at the Alabama Youth Institute at Tuskegee University, the Florida Youth Institute at the University of Florida, alumni from our Borlaug Ruan Internship Program and Wallace Carver Fellowship Program, and our Iowa anti-hunger partners. 

Throughout these sessions, we consistently heard that there were inadequate resources in rural and urban communities to deal with the short-term and long-term impact of hunger. Our stakeholders shared that we need to increase food access in rural and urban communities, to better support farmers,  to expand federal programs like the Child Tax Credit, WIC, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to create universal schools meals programs, and to address the significant racial inequities that disproportionality impact Black, Indigenous, and Latinx families. The White House will be using insights from these listening sessions to inform their federal action plan to end hunger by 2030. 

As we work towards a world without hunger, we are committed to increasing our impact by:

• Investing in youth leadership: Every year, we engage over 10,000 students to empower and educate them to understand opportunities they have to improve food security. We will continue to grow our programs, providing educational and professional experiences on pressing food security and agriculture issues, and ensuring that students from marginalized communities are centered in efforts to end
• Elevating those awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation: We recognize and reward individuals making exceptional achievements in addressing food security. We will continue to enhance resources, including the World Food Prize, so that our awardees can have an even greater impact from their work to end hunger. 
• Convening partners and developing solutions: The World Food Prize Foundation brings people together for dialogue and collaboration. Through the International Borlaug Dialogue, the Iowa Hunger Summit, and other convenings, we bring partners together to identify problems and build the much needed collaborative solutions to tackling hunger issues.

We are incredibly grateful to  all of the students, alumni, and partners who participated in our listening sessions. We are inspired by your commitment and impact. We hope that this year’s conference serves as a catalyst for transformative change that gets us closer to achieving a world without hunger.