David Nabarro

This evening I joined the EESC President, Staffan Nilsson, and various EESC members in welcoming participants in tomorrow’s major food security conference to Brussels and to the European Economic and Social Committee. These included a number of important figures from the United Nations: David Nabarro, UN Special Representative on Food Security and Nutrition and Sheila Sisulu, Deputy Executive Director for Hunger Solutions, of the UN’s World Food Programme, and Hafez Ghanem, Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Development Department of the Food and Agriculture Organisation. They will be joined tomorrow by a range of senior figures working in their field. There was a quiet buzz of expectancy in the air, based on a common recognition that this is a pressing issue and that the planning of the conference, on the eve of a  22-23 June G20 Agriculture Ministers meeting, could not have been more timely. (President Nilsson decided to hold the meeting, co-organised with the European Commission, as a response to the French G20 Presidency’s request for recommendations.) The presence of our high-level guests, UN and otherwise, attested graphically to that.