This event is over.
Event Details:
Global food insecurity is rising, due in part to the impact of climate change on weather patterns. In South Asia, where 25% of the world’s hungry and 40% of the world’s malnourished children and women live, increasing climatic risks such as floods, droughts, cyclones, and heat waves pose a tremendous challenge to farmers and to policy makers.
On Tuesday, November 14, 2023, the King Center on Global Development invites you to hear about how South Asia’s great progress in the last four decades in food production and availability can be maintained and furthered in this adverse context. Claudia Sadoff, former executive managing director at CGIAR, and Rikin Gandhi, co-founder and executive director of Digital Green, will share their perspectives on the impact of local policies and programs, as well as share the challenges still to be overcome.
About the Panelists
Claudia Sadoff was the first Executive Managing Director of the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers (CGIAR), a global research partnership for a food-secure future dedicated to transforming food, land, and water systems in a climate crisis. She also served as the Director General of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), a CGIAR Center headquartered in Sri Lanka working globally to find water solutions for sustainable, climate-resilient development.
Rikin Gandhi co-founded and is the executive director of Digital Green, a global development organization that empowers smallholder farmers to lift themselves out of poverty by harnessing the collective power of digital technology and grassroots-level partnerships. Gandhi began his career at Oracle, where he received patents for designing linguistic search algorithms. Later, he joined Microsoft Research’s Technology for Emerging Markets team in India, where he researched ways to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally. There, he created Digital Green to use peer-to-peer farming videos to increase the efficiency of agricultural extension services.
About the Moderator
David Lobell is the Benjamin M. Page Professor in the Department of Earth System Science at the Doerr School of Sustainability and the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE). He is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and Research (SIEPR).