Explore the WEF 2026 session ‘When Food Becomes Security,’ focusing on how food systems impact global stability, economic resilience, and societal well-being, with insights from experts and leaders
At Davos, leaders argued that food systems have become a front-line security issue as climate shocks, trade disruption, and input inflation threaten social stability. Moderator Sam Kass warned of “unprecedented volatility,” citing looming yield declines in staples like rice and the destabilizing effects of regional crop failures, migration, and political unrest. Nigeria’s Vice-President Kashim Shettima framed food security as “a macroeconomic security and governance issue,” organized around production, environmental resilience, and West African integration. He emphasized climate-tailored varieties, “food security corridors” to reopen contested breadbaskets, and replacing import dependence with local substitutes, while making smallholders “investable at scale.” IFAD President Alvaro Lario stressed that “producing is not enough”: resilience requires distribution, infrastructure, credit, insurance, and market access, enabled by partnerships and government ownership. Brazilian farmer Ana Carolina Zimmermann grounded the debate in farm realities: farmers are “price takers,” bear systemic risk, and often lack basics like internet, health access, and labor—yet must be “at the table” to co-design policy. Yara CEO Svein Tore Holsether argued resilience “starts in the field” with healthy soils, precision nutrition, and incentives, calling for data standardization to accelerate a “fourth agricultural revolution” and move climate adaptation “from pilot to reality.”
Welcome everybody in the room. And for everybody joining from around the world on the live stream. My name is Sam Kass and a partner at Aker Ventures, and I'm super excited for this conversation on When Food becomes Security. Now it's becoming more and more visible every day. That food and our food systems are really the foundation of our security and really national security. We're starting to face unprecedented volatility around the world. We're seeing global trade being interrupted and disrupted, rising inflation, increasing input costs, and climate change is starting to wreak havoc on our on our food system. It used to think that these were, in the climate standpoint, far out issues, but they are starting to take hold right now. We know that our food systems is probably the leading cause of environmental degradation around the world, and yet holds most of the solutions to many of the environmental and climate change challenges that we have. But it is really on the front lines and it's getting battered. Just last year, chocolate prices were up over 200%. Coffee prices also starting to rise. But when you start to model out what the future looks like in 2040, 2050, it starts to get pretty, pretty dire. Take rice. You could look at this for any of the major commodities. But take rice for example. Estimates range depending on where you are in the world, a 10 to 40% decline in yields, and you have over 3.5 billion people who depend on rice every day for their sustenance. When you start to think about not just the overall decline of those yields, but also the year over year regional collapses of crops that will become more and more normalized. The forced migration as a result, the increased food insecurity and political instability is something really, actually hard to fathom in that future. So this conversation, I think, could not be more important at this moment. As we try to figure out how to chart a path forward. And I can't think of four individuals who would be better suited to help us, figure out what that future looks like. I could go I could spend the whole 45 minutes going through all of their accomplishments. But I will keep it very brief. Your Excellency of Sesame, up from, Vice president of Nigeria, has made food security a top priority in food sovereignty, a top priority, and has done some of the most impressive work that I've heard of. And so very eager to get your thoughts and your vision. Alvaro, laureate, who's the president of of Efad, which is a really unique institution, kind of groundbreaking, providing credit, to smallholder farmers around the world, and doing some of the most important work that that I know of, maybe the most important voice on the panel, and Carolina Zimmerman, who is a farmer from Brazil. And I think so many of these conversations, we, miss the actual voices of the people who are actually producing our food. She'll tell you about her farm, but she farms both cattle and soy and corn as her main crops, but so important to center our producers in these conversations. And then Sven, who leads Yara, one of the most important, agricultural companies in the world, has done some of the most impressive, groundbreaking innovations in pushing, this whole industry forward. And your voice for many years has been, quite inspiring. So thank you for your leadership. So let's let's get into this. Your Excellency, please. You've really placed food sovereignty at the center of your agenda for Nigeria. Give us a sense of your vision for domestic food production, what it means both to Nigeria and to the continent, about how you have real food sovereignty in your country.
I thank you so much. In Nigeria, we don't look at security purely as an agricultural issue. It is a macroeconomic security and governance issue. And our major focus on food security is to use it as a pillar for national security, for regional cohesion, and anchor it on three principal pillars improved food production, improved environmental production, and of course, regional integration within the West African subregion. Because of the peculiarities of the global trend, we have no option than to really look inwards towards repositioning our agricultural industry, and I will just dwell on 4 or 5 key areas resilient agricultural system in our different ecological zones. Nigeria is big and there is an incestuous relationship between economy and ecology. In the Sahelian zone and in the north of Nigeria, we are facing problems of desertification, deforestation and drought in the riverine areas in the southern part of the country and in the north central, we have issues of flooding. So what are the solutions? We have to look for drought resistant, drought tolerant and early maturing varieties of rice, sorghum, millet and for the southern part of the country, the riverine communities. We have to look for food systems that are plot resistant, rice and cassava that can do well in that part of the world. And secondly, and most importantly, we have to do with security challenge areas. And these are largely the food basket of our nation. So the government is making efforts towards forming food security corridors and community, community based, security engagement to allow people to go back until the soil and there is a new program being conceived and executed by the government. And that has to do with back to the Prime initiative, so that our displaced people can be supplied with inputs, with insurance, with capital to go back for food production purposes. The third challenge, which we have a specific solution, is the issue of our import dependence and forex volatility, which has a direct impact on inflationary trends in the country. We import wheat, sugar, we import dairy products, and I believe efforts are being made to accelerate the production of most of these crops. And we are also using local substitutes like sorghum, like millet, cassava flour, all in an effort to address all those, imbalances. Then the issue of import security inputs such as fertilizer improve seeds, because the whole mantra is on increase in yield. As I have always said, entrepreneurial capitalism is embedded in the very psyche of the average Nigerian. But what our people are lacking is the wherewithal to place them on Jeffrey Sachs face ladder of development, and the present administration is determined to change the narratives. And in the fullness of time, Nigerians will come to benefit tremendously from our initiatives. I don't want to dominate the discussion, but I have so much to say. But there are other other members of the panelist whom I shall allow to make their contribution. Thank you.
Amazing. You can feel your passion for, for for these issues and for the future of agriculture. So that's that's amazing. We have more. You'll get more time to get deeper into it. Alvaro, like what is it going to take to get more equity and resilience through the system? Like, how would you describe where we are and from where we are, and what are we moving towards? What do you think that that really needs to look like?
So I think, thank you for for having us. What is clear is that we have more leaders as the vice president of Nigeria, which every time I talk to him is I learn a lot. And he's clearly very passionate. And I'll talk a little bit of some of the programs that actually were investing and how this, this, this can also support the the vision in Nigeria or in Brazil to, but I believe that we are seeing more and more leaders actually, especially in Africa, also in Southeast Asia, really putting, food security as a primary driver of economic growth, also of job creation of income in many of these rural areas and, and really putting a lot of their policies behind. Because if you think about the current trade discussions, always the red line is agriculture was in the US, in the EU, Japan, China, other geopolitical areas. Now we are seeing also a lot of African leaders catching up, trying to determine in what crops they need to be food self-sufficient, in which ones food sovereignty. And it goes beyond also production, like the vice president was saying. It relates about distribution, transportation, infrastructure, access to credit, access to insurance, making sure that many of these small scale farmers have access to markets. So producing is not enough. So I do believe that there's more and more focus. However, we also need to see the investments behind in the case of of Nigeria, for example, we have been from Efad working on special agro processing zones, which have been quite successful and now are trying to get more regions around it. Also with also with some social enterprises like services providing access to seeds, to fertilizers, to markets, to 650,000 farmers. Also in Brazil, we have been having investments related very much to what you were mentioning, some of the climate shocks and droughts in the northeast. What is important to understand is that agriculture, food systems are also related to livelihoods, to income, and they need to become a business. So many times, a lot of the shocks, a lot of the lack of access to certain inputs, technologies, knowledge is fundamental. And that's where I think there's more and more need to come to partnerships, like here at Wecf between private sector, which is the global agro businesses, where it's the local financial institutions, where it's multilaterals like Ifat and governments. And I think that's where where we will be able to really address a very, very complex challenges.
And many of those shocks are hitting the most vulnerable producers around the world right now. So, Anna, I think it's important to ground us in the realities of, of farming. Like, it'd be great to, you know, there's always a lot of people talking on agricultural panels, that don't farm. So I'd love to just level set to begin with. You know, what are the biggest challenges that you, that you face? What are the risks and things that keep you up at night? And what do people don't really understand about what it means to make a livelihood as a as a producer?
Thank you. Sam. Thank you for having me. I'm very humbled for being a farmer here. And so I'm going to give you a little bit of context, especially about Brazil. So my dad comes from the south, which is a is a faraway region from I'm from which is Sahara region. And then he had not many opportunities. And then he came up and there he met another two guys. And then they became, they had a business about inputs. And later on they started farming. And it's quite striking because today I'm only here because I'm a privileged person. I can speak English because somehow agriculture changed our family's lives, and agriculture change everything that we've seen in that region and change other people's lives as well. It changed the way we saw the jobs. But what strikes me the most is that changed that way. But but also we do have problems still in infrastructure. We still have problems in internet. And we have other, other problems in which some other parts of the world, which they have smaller and medium farms, also do have. And also what keeps us at night is that we are risk takers, and we have all the burdens that's happening in the whole value chain. So whenever we're talking about credits or we need to cooperate with nature, right? So we are impacted by nature. We don't know how the weather is going to be. Every time it changes. We have lots of steps to to deal with. We are price takers, so we don't control the price of the inputs. We also don't control the price of what we're going to sell. So pretty much we need to pray for everything to happen. We also do have lots of problems and not listening that too much here because we're hearing lots about AI but about labor. So still, it's something that strikes us. And especially in medium and smaller farms, you still need manual work, and some people still need some literacy. In terms of digitalizing things, it's not that easy. Even though you have ChatGPT nowadays, some people don't know how to do some math. So there are some very, very basic stuff that we don't get yet in terms of how it is to be a farmer and how passionate people are about that, because that's the relationship with the land. I mean, how many of you would leave the cities to, you know, have a garden or to do something abroad? And, have you tried to have some plans, how hard it is to keep it up? So in a farm it's even harder. And it's also hard to be a leader when you don't have that much infrastructure. Also, we do have a problem with the with the public image of being a farmer nowadays. And we also have this polarized world in which if you don't see that farming is a is a dignified thing to be doing, so why would people be attracted to? And most of all, if we think about the system, but we don't consider people's livelihoods to get change. How my family did change because of farming. How are we supposed to do that if we don't take care of farmers? How are we supposed to tackle food security? So taking care of farmers is taking care of food security, and we should put people, people's first and then think about how we can control things together.
That's amazing. You really we were talking earlier and you you know, we were talking about all the data, new data and precision agriculture and AI. And then you were like, yeah, there's no signal in any of my farms. I don't have internet access. And there's some really basic fundamental infrastructure that's needed to even begin to bring a lot of the advancements to most to most growers around the world. So, so, like, how do you when you step back? I mean, you're a global business, have operations around the world. From your vantage point, like, where do you see the biggest risks that the system is holding? And where do you see the private sector's role and responsibility to try to mitigate some of those risks and try to move the system into a better place in the future?
Well, thanks. And already very good framing of the state of the food system right now and what that means for food security and with extreme weather. That's the reality now. And it's facing farmers across across the world. So it's about building a more resilient food system. And for me, resilience starts in the field. The farmer and and then we need to focus on how do we grow food and how do we create crops. And we grow a crop. We take the crop out of the field and we bring it to the market, but we're also taking nutrients out of the soil, and we need to replenish that in order to provide enough nutrients for the for the plants to, to, to grow. The approach to that is very much commoditized. And, and we need to ensure a healthy soil. And Sam, you used to work in the white House, you were a policy advisor on nutrition. And if I told you that you could only give two or maybe three nutrients to people, what would happen to their health? It would be devastating, right? Why do we think like that for for plants. And if we, if we rather think about soil as a living organism, which it is, and then do precision farming, we bring the right nutrients back into the soil, we get healthy soil. And when you have healthy soil, you get so many other things for free. You get higher yields, better quality, crops. And it's much more resistant to, to extreme weather as well weather. And seated myself several times in this last year. What happens in droughts or floods? The difference between healthy soil and not. But then in order to do that, we need to have incentives for for farmers. We need to enable farmers to to do this as well. And no farmer can do it alone. No input company can do that alone. So that's about thinking the whole value chain. And and this morning I started us well at PepsiCo. And we see how, how they're now working throughout the whole value chain engaging the farmers. And you get that kind of interaction and incentives in place. There's a lot that can be be done. And by the way, and I can't think of any, occupation more important than being a farmer. And we need to, we need to cherish that. We need to, to help farmers to to to get incentives to help on the livelihoods and the everyday work that you do as farmers.
Definitely. Second, that I definitely second that, that opinion. All right. So let's let's move on to some more, get a little deeper into the pathways forward. It's obviously going to need a lot more innovation and diversification to create a more resilient system. We're going from the most stable, 10,000 years on the historical record of the on planet Earth. We just got really lucky, right? We've been living in a time of just really stable weather, with plentiful resources of soil and water, cheap energy. And now we're moving into a highly volatile time, of extreme weather, dwindling soil. We're running out of water. And so we have a lot of a lot of work to do. I do want to just, put a little shout out to the West, just put out a really important report on resiliency, and particularly as it pertains to our oceans and as a land mammal. I'm biased to the land, but we forget that most of the planet is covered by oceans. And so investing in blue foods, innovation and partnerships for impact, is part of we're all sort of land focused, but fisheries, are foundation to about a billion people's livelihoods and sustenance on planet Earth. And so this is a really important part of the dialogue. So, what do you think is fundamental in Nigeria to improve, the economic outcomes and the long term resiliency for, for farmers? And Fisher.
Well, it's a very interesting issue because we have to move from there has to be a paradigm shift in attitudinal disposition as leaders when it comes to agriculture. Hitherto, we used to treat it as some welfarist model. There has to be a system based approach anchored on science and technology and affordability. Some of the issues that are agitating the minds of our people has to do with that. There has to be a shift from subsidies to increment in income and productivity. As I've always said, the whole mantra is on increase in yield, and this entails embracing improved seeds, right? Utlization improved breeds of fish, good waterways and most importantly, there has to be access to peanuts, insurance and small scale fishermen. And small farmers are at the highest risk. But in Nigeria, for instance, the government, through the instruments of the Bank of Agriculture and Nestle, were able to come up with a blend of financial instruments with affordable insurance and so many beautiful financial products for the farmers to have access to credit, because without credit, without support, they cannot make much headway. Then the issue of access to land titles and waterways for the fishermen and the farmers through digitization and tokenization, our farmers can have access to land titles that will make them eligible to access support from financial institutions and, of course, producer organizations that will make them possible from cooperatives for the purpose of aggregation to lowering costs, and for them to serve as somewhat of a family organization to pursue their interests across the board. And most importantly, for us in Africa, especially in the light of global trends, intra-African trade has almost become a necessity. There has been some alignments now within Africa. We are trading only 10.7%. Europe is 70%.
Wow.
Information trade is going for 6,860%. So we have to make efforts under the canopy of the African Free Trade Area to see that we really try to get our things in house to beyond the climate shocks. The global supply disruptions are there.
Yeah big time.
So I don't want to dwell much on that. But honestly, we have to look inwards and see to it that as Africans we find solutions to our problems. And honestly, we have no business being poor. Honestly, I'm speaking from the bottom of my heart because in certain parts of Nigeria, our land is so rich that if we can plant money, it can grow. So it's all about us embracing modernity.
Be a farmer. I'm moving to Nigeria. I'm coming.
So all we need is to embrace modernity, improved agricultural practices, fertilization. And before you know it, you know right now the yield on top of our crops like rice, two three tonnes per hectare. In some climes they produce ten tonnes per hectare. The same thing with potatoes. Most of our output is low compared to global, standards. So be rest assured that the trajectory, as I have always said of global growth, is facing Africa and Nigeria will certainly make or mar that destination. One out of every four Africans is a Nigerian, and by 2050 will be the third most populous nation on earth. You worked in the white House by 2050, will be more populous than the United States. Our population will hit 440 million people.
I'll be living there long before then, so that's fine. Can I ask you one quick follow up? Because of my background in politics, it sounds like that vision must really resonate. Like from a from it sounds like really good politics to is this a platform that when you, you know, are out there messaging it, that you're getting really positive response? Or do you feel like this is a vision that has a lot of work to do to get people to rally around?
Honestly, it's a positive response. It's good politics because ours is a very, very young nation. The average age of the Nigerian nation is 16.9. We have to make agriculture enticing through agribusiness incubation. Through mentoring. I'm a farmer. I'm a practicing farmer. I have some young men under my tutelage whom I am grooming to embrace farming. Farming is not romantic. It's not attractive, but we are making it. So look at this beautiful lady, she said. Palmer. So I believe that, I'm confident about tomorrow. I believe Africa has started getting it right. And in the fullness of time, I believe we'll stand on our feet. Yeah.
That's amazing. Can you can you tell us about some of the new models, like, fundamentally, maybe one specific example to make it tangible that you think are really is the model that actually unlocks a lot of this change, growth, stability and actual economic value to the supply chain, but particularly for the growers who need it most. What are those things that we should really be focusing on and trying to lift up?
So I think one of the things that we have learned about food systems, and I'll mention some models, that there's no silver bullet. So actually it's important to understand, first of all, that it's not the same to operate as a small scale farmer in Brazil, even in the south and in the northeast. It's not the same to be a small scale farmer in Brazil than being a large scale farmer in Nigeria. It's not the same as in Indonesia. In Zambia, I mean, that's a very clear one of the things that I think. And I'll go I'll answer your question, but one of the things that that really matters, I think, is to understand that the challenge when you are small scale farmer in certain low income or fragile affected state is massive and it's not the same even as a small scale farmer, obviously in a European state. And that sometimes there's the issue about, obviously access to credit to insurance, aggregation, scalability, all of that is always the same, but the type of responses are not the same for us. What really matters is to make sure that the models are not focusing on subsistence farming, but actually it's small scale SMEs in small scale producers, coffee growers that actually can connect and can even get to the stage where they can export or trade. I mean, if we think, for example, about Africa, the reality is that they are currently importing in terms of food imports, 70 to 100 billion every year. You can think about effects, the consequences. You have 10 million young people coming to the job market every year in Africa. A lot of the population, at least half in many countries, is related to food systems, agriculture. So there's a huge potential. And I think the issue many times is that it's very complex. And how you bring many of the partners together with the local institutions, the national agricultural banks, the local private sector, the global sector, the multilaterals, the governments, how much the governments invest in infrastructure or actually in extension services. So it's very complex. That's the reality for us. And I'll give you one model. For example, we're operating actually in Africa is bringing trying to promote climate smart agriculture practices for small scale farmers by getting them access to 0% interest rate loans, which is one of the things that we know that small scale farmers, the 3 or 4 years, first years, they don't have the capital to actually turn into regenerative agriculture. They need some initial inputs. So that is one way through local financial institutions, the risking. And that's a 300 million model working with local financial institutions and with the governments themselves. That's one way to addressing a lot of complex issues which relate to forced migration to to hunger, to poverty, to CO2 emissions. So it's not simple, but there's models that can work. But the reality is that we are all speaking different languages. That's why coming to and being a financial institution, also UN agency, I think for us we speak different languages, but brokering those relationships is not it's not easy.
And that model, just so we understand, you're providing the capital to the local financial institutions to do that, lending at that, at that rate. Exactly. Backing those loans. Got it. Okay.
And for climate smart agriculture.
For the practices specifically.
Exactly. To try to support that transition for small scale farmers in rural areas because local agribusinesses, even in Africa, they get lots of bids, they get bought up by a lot of sovereign wealth funds, land, all of that. You have the capital, you have the finance, the challenges. You go to rural areas, you go to a certain scale. That's where the real challenge lies and where the livelihoods are transformed, where you can really create that increase of farmers income. That's a different level of challenge.
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay. I think we've heard now kind of in a number of different perspectives, around the challenges and perception of, of, of what it means to be a farmer or a producer. And in many parts of the world, you know, getting the next generation to want to farm is a huge problem. Certainly in the United States. We're seeing, you know, a massive turnover of land and nobody there to farm it, which has huge implications on the resiliency as consolidation just gets bigger and bigger, we have less diversity in the system. I know it's not this way in all parts of the world, but it's often an older man's world. And as a younger woman, I would love your perspective on a couple of things. What has it been like for you to, you know, and I've been down in Brazil, been, you know, experiencing how agriculture has worked down there. It'd be great to hear your experience a little bit as breaking into this industry and starting to take over a lot of the operations. And what do you think is going to be necessary for us to get young people to want to continue to farm? Because if we don't have people actually managing the land, there's a lot that's going to be lost. There's only so much a robot can do. So be love. Love to hear your perspective on that. Okay.
To be honest, you know, I'm very honest. I was at first, I was not passionate about agriculture, per se, for the plant, but I'm passionate about is about people, and I'm passionate about what agriculture can help and what can it bring to people's lives. And if we don't think about how agriculture or farming means for better livelihoods, it's very hard to bring people at farming, because if you don't have the proper I mean, whenever you're little and you think, what do you want to be when you grow up? If you don't see to have a place? And being a farmer is not something that you want to be, why you want to do that? So we need to create enabling environment for farming, being a viable business and a place where people want to live. And that means stability. That means, not having food security problems. That means being accessible to have health. That's something that's very hard. I mean, in the middle of Brazil, we have to go for hours to go to get health, for example. Still the roads also, and also for creating this business environment. So we need to address those very basic issues so we can can make things actually attractable for youth. So we can understand that can be a valuable life. And for me what change it was in terms of purpose a millennial. So purpose is important to me. And even though I you know, I'm not Gen Z just kidding. But really it's really about people. And that comes to to a second point, which is we keep talking about how farmers are important, but are we really bringing farmers to talk? You know, so I'm really thankful for the WAF team for inviting me here, because if we're not at the table, we're going to be on the menus and we don't want to be on the menus being picked. We're going to be we want to be at the table talking because we are part of the problems, but we are also part of the solutions and we want to be. So whenever there's this polarization world in which environmentalists don't talk to farmers and people don't talk, what I urge you all, especially CEOs, leaders, policymakers, is invite farmers to co-design these different food systems in which we're willing to. So we need to cooperate and work together and have the difficult conversations together to find ways in which you can collaborate, not just put all the burden on the farmers. We cannot put all the risk on the farmer. We cannot put all the debts on the farmer. Otherwise, farmer is not going to be viable and we're going to put food security down. So we need to tackle that. The second point is also about science. So if you think about Brazil, 40 years ago we were food importers and now we're exporting food. And that's pretty much because of science. Whenever my dad came, we had less than 0.5% of organic matter on the soil. And nowadays we're up to 3%. And people are not really talking about that. We have so many practices that you're probably I'm not sure how familiar you are with, but for example, we have no tillage, which means we literally are planting things on top of the straw. And that keeps the soil moisturizer moisturized. And it makes erosion. I mean, it doesn't make, we don't have erosion anymore. And then we can have the soil health. We have. No, we have the crop rotation, the we rotate also the, the crops. There's so many different other things by inputs. For example, we need also to talk about climate adaptation, not only mitigation, because if we're considering this world, how we actually can survive this, this world, we're using a monte Carlo, which is, a cactus, a bacteria of a mandacaru to increase resilience to droughts. So that's technology. And we are also tackling environmental issues to reduce the risks. So there are many other things. And it's important for farmers to help to design. Because if you design policies that are not good for farmers, they're not going to work. And I can give you lots of examples which are happening right now. For example, whenever you talk about ugr, it's something that it really hurts our hearts in so many ways. But I can also give good examples of things that are happening. So whenever we talk about China. China has a program about cattle that they only they, they want for 24 months. So only we say 40 cow. It means they're younger. It means they are. It's safe in a way that it's about sanitary sanitary reasons. And this has brought so much good for, for the whole industry. And also they're paying oh, importantly, they're paying a premium because of it. So nowadays we have cattle earlier which is going to reduce methane emissions. We have better herd management. And we also getting better also in science. So what are these incentives that actually are helping farmers to you know, whenever we hear farmers to change a perspective and tackle this, and most of all, we need to dialogue. I mean, we're talking about this period of dialogue. The word is not very dialoguing very much these years, but it was it's I mean, my hope for the future as a young woman, that we can keep having this conversation, the hard conversations, so we can tackle those solutions.
I love it, I love it. Then so, one of the largest agricultural companies in the world, what do you think is going to be key to transition? The system. And I would love to just given your provide the majority of fertilizer around the globe, at least the biggest, what do you see? And a lot of pressure on fertilizer, a lot of sensitivity around it tied to energy prices and and climate. So what do you see? The key unlocks broadly. But also make sure with the focus on fertilizer, since it's basically the underpinning of of how we're growing food.
Yeah. And I think we've heard it from from many here already. We're reframing this under food security, but we need to think about farming as a business, because that's the only way we can scale and we can, in order to make it profitable, to reinvest and and grow the businesses. So, so, so let's treat the farmers as business people because that's what they are. And then we also need to help to to simplify and create incentives as well. And right now we're in the fourth agricultural revolution driven by technology. And my frustration is that it's not happening fast enough. And, you know, when we're walking in the in the streets here in, in Davos, there's AI everywhere and AI, you know, imagine what that could do for farming and described really well on all the things that she has to master, being a farmer and on top of it, working in nature, the challenge we're up against is, data, really, and the lack of standardization of, of data so that we can really create the tools that would help farmers. We have models in place, and we have technology good enough to support the farmers. But when we see the the models not working, it's because data isn't of the quality that, that it needs to to be. And that's, for us as an input provider. I'm not trying to maximize the amount of fertilizer. The opposite. I want precise fertilization. And that will help our business model. The the more science and the more data driven the solutions are, the better it is for for Yara. So so so so there's no it's not a negative business case for us. It's the opposite rather. But then we need to, equip with the technology. And here's also where the young generation comes in, bringing new technologies in and also demonstrating that the impression of what farming used to be is not the reality in the fields today. It's much more technologically advanced and, and but then we also need to to drive that forward. So together with my dear friend Strive Masiyiwa in, we launched an effort, called the Go-getters to to to to celebrate young African agripreneurs. And when I see what they're able to, to to do the kind of, innovation and what they're driving and how they're creating these businesses, it's extremely inspiring. And we need to get more of these stories out there to to show that it's a tremendous business opportunity for, for, for young people. And you can bring in drone technology. You can go that for for imagery of the of the fields. You can apply fertilizers with with drones as well. But it's all these new tools now that we need the new generation to help us to speed up and to, to to really accelerate the fourth agricultural revolution.
I love it as a, as an investor in, in food and agriculture around climate and health. I share your frustration about the slowness of, of of, you know, adoption of these new technologies. We're making progress, but it's definitely not going at the pace that it that it needs.
Yeah. And also on the input side. So I was in early December, I was in Sevilla and, you know, using Biostimulants and it's one of our biggest investments that are coming online this year in the UK, building on the portfolio we already have, when you get the right biostimulants into the field of the farmer to withstand heat stress, that farmer is able to grow pistachios in a part of the world where you're not able to do that from from nature, but but with using the right technology, using the right input, it's more a more heat resistant crop. And that's what it's all about to to help farmers to and equip them with the products that they need to withstand extreme weather. And that's not a, you know, fiction five, 10 or 50 years out in time. It's possible, even today.
Amazing. That gives me a lot of hope right there. We're going to we're going to we're going a little short on time. I want to ask one quick question for you. Same question for everybody. 1 or 2 things that you need to help unlock the vision, like what is the partnership or what is the what could you know? There's a lot of people watching. What are the 1 or 2 things that you need, you know, briefly, that would help dramatically accelerate your ability to to see your vision through.
Well, for us to see our vision through, especially in Nigeria, Napoleon said China is a sleeping giant. Let it sleep. When she wakes up, she will disturb the world. So the Nigeria is the African giant and it has woken up from its slumber. And what I want to see in the next 12 months is to make it possible for small holders and pictures to become investable at scale, because farming is business and farming requires modernization, as rightly said by the gentleman, and farming requires technology. Secondly, what I wish to happen in the next couple of months is to move climate adaptation from pilot to reality. This is what I wish we can accomplish in Africa. And of course, I want to start the regional markets. As I said earlier, as I lamented earlier, intra-African trade is only 10.7%. And in the light of global challenges, we hope that we will start walking the talk and start trading within African nations.
What what can we all do to, you know, what's the one need that would unlock Ifad's impact that much more than you already doing?
So to me, it's clearly government ownership, vision and investments. I think that's the primary. Then obviously local financial institutions, the rest of the actors, the local private sector follows. But I think one of the challenges in many countries and in many governments is that actually we think about agriculture, about, food and only agriculture, but it requires, as we have seen, a lot of investments in many other areas. So we're talking and it has impact on health. It has impact on energy. But it's clearly infrastructure. It relates to many different investments within a country. And I think that approach of food systems that was mentioned, but especially on how all of this is linked together, can unlock the opportunities we cannot expect, neither the global private sector nor the local private sector to really invest in in such a sector, if we don't have that ecosystem so that ownership and accountability is important, and that reflects also in how the investments are coming from the government. First, amazing.
So two insights today I was hearing the CEO of Nvidia saying how AI is part of a five layer scheme. So you need energy, you need cloud, you need, ships. You need so many technologies so you can get actually AI. So this is also happening with farming. You need some levels of technology infrastructure so we can get to the level of. So we have the best of the best in farming, but we also have the worst of the worst. To reduce this inequality we need to build up infrastructure. That's good enough so we can scale that. So we need first the right infrastructure with the layers so we can actually unlock that. And second, again it's help. Ask farmers to help to design things especially to make their livelihoods better, to understand how they can be a viable business rather than having all the risks, and most of all, for farmers to help to feed the world as a business and to have better livelihoods.
Missy.
I was going to say two things. Infrastructure was the first one already done. The second one is standardization of data so that we and in the spirit of the World Economic Forum on Dialogue and also creating across the whole value chain, if we create a data set, pre-competitive, of course, where we can help farmers to to simplify their lives and to utilize technology like we saw in AI, I think we could make great progress and we're ready for from the other side, we have the Vida, foundation that we set up. Because this cannot be controlled by a company. It has to be a foundation for for as a global common good.
Amazing. We could keep talking for hours, but sadly, we are, we are out of time. Thank you all for your leadership, for your vision. For all the work ahead, the. I will just say that we're out of time and, the the need to go from pilots. I agree with you. I hate pilots. To scale is absolutely critical. But I think with leadership on the stage and for people around the world who are watching, we have a chance to fundamentally ensure that our kids and our grandkids could enjoy the kind of lives that we've been so lucky to have and to be able to feed themselves and build, more prosperous families. So thank you all. Thank you to the Wecf, and look forward to working hard this year to, to bring some of this to life.
Thank you.