FAO’s chief economist on why eating well now costs 25% more than it did five years ago

The price of eating well 

This year’s SOFI report focuses on the cost of a healthy diet. Torero told us it now costs $4.28 a day to eat healthily, once you adjust for what money actually buys in different countries, 25% more expensive than five years ago, and well above the $3-a-day extreme poverty line. The reason isn’t the food itself. Staple foods make up around half of what we eat by calories, and they’re relatively cheap. It’s fruit, vegetables and animal-source foods, the things that carry most of the actual nutrition, that carry most of the cost. Most of that cost is added after the food leaves the farm: 70 to 75% comes from storage, processing, transport, cold chains (the refrigeration that keeps perishable food at the right temperature all the way to the shelf) and wholesale markets. In remote areas without proper infrastructure, prices can roughly double. 

A third of global emissions, and a sector still overlooked 

Agrifood systems account for around a third of global emissions once the entire value chain, farming, processing, transport, retail, is counted, Torero said. Yet the sector receives only 3 to 4% of global climate financing, compared with energy, which he said has largely been “resolving itself” through private investment and the shift to renewables. Closing that gap, he argued, is one of the more urgent conversations heading into COP31. 

Why land degradation isn’t inevitable 

Torero pushed back on the idea that land degradation is an unavoidable cost of farming. It’s a policy choice, he said: land only degrades when it isn’t managed properly, and expanding farmland to compensate comes at the cost of forests, and the planet’s capacity to absorb emissions. Producing more food while protecting land isn’t a trade-off, he argued, it’s a question of using the right practices and technology, including regenerating land that’s already degraded. 

The IKEA connection 

Torero described an app FAO has built to tackle food waste, which sorts what’s thrown away into categories and shows the water, emissions and nutrients lost with each type. It started at a small island resort, was rolled out across FAO’s own canteens in Rome, feeding around 6,000 people, and is now used in school feeding programmes, helping improve recipes without needing to ask kids what they don’t like. He named IKEA directly as a partner FAO is working with on food waste. 

IKEA has been tracking and cutting food waste in its own restaurants for years, using an AI tool called Waste Watcher, built on technology from Winnow, a company Ingka Group has invested in since 2019. It weighs and sorts what’s thrown out in the kitchen, in real time, so food teams can see exactly what’s being over-prepared and adjust. Alongside that, a partnership with Too Good To Go has saved a million bags of surplus food from going to waste, and IKEA is now starting to measure what customers leave on their plates, not just what’s wasted in the kitchen. 

So why is IKEA doing this? Because the two problems Torero describes, food that’s lost before it reaches a plate, and food that’s wasted after it does, are exactly the ones IKEA’s restaurants sit in the middle of. Torero’s work is about fixing that at a global, systemic level. IKEA’s is about fixing it in 400-odd kitchens serving hundreds of millions of meals a year. 

A few simple ways to cut food waste at home 

Torero was clear that most food waste doesn’t happen in restaurants or supermarkets; it happens at home. A few small habits go a long way: 

• Plan meals before you shop, and shop with a list. It sounds obvious, but it’s the single biggest lever against buying more than you’ll use. 

• Store fruit and vegetables properly. Some, like tomatoes and potatoes, actually last longer outside the fridge. 

• Understand the difference between “use by” and “best before.” Use by is a safety date. Best before is about quality, the food is often still fine to eat after it. 

• Freeze what you won’t get to in time, bread, leftovers, herbs, most things freeze better than people expect. 

• Get comfortable with food that doesn’t look perfect. A slightly bruised apple or a wonky carrot is exactly as good for you as a flawless one. 

The hidden cost no one budgets for 

Torero put a number on what poor diets cost beyond the supermarket: around $11 trillion a year in hidden costs to the food system, of which $8 trillion is health-related, driven by rising rates of overweight, obesity and non-communicable disease. Globally, 2.6 billion people, one in three, don’t currently have access to a healthy diet. 

What keeps him up, and what gives him hope 

Torero’s biggest concern right now isn’t food scarcity, it’s uncertainty. Trade has shifted from “just in time” to “just in case,” and shocks like the Strait of Hormuz, the war in Ukraine and Covid-19 keep pushing prices up faster than they need to. But he’s optimistic. Even through the worst shocks of recent years, he said, food never actually disappeared from shelves. And he sees a generational shift coming: in Peru, his home country, young people are moving into agribusiness, drawn by new technology and better pay, a pattern he expects to repeat across Africa as the sector grows and modernises.

Listen to the latest episode of Screw It:

Screw It – Episode 12 – Full Conversation Transcript

Editorial note: this transcript has been cleaned up for readability, filler words, false starts and repeated words from the original captioning have been removed, and some clear transcription errors have been corrected. Wording and content otherwise reflect what was said as closely as possible. 

Kat: Welcome to Screw It. I’m joined by Doctor Maximo Torero from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. He joins us from New York, where they are launching their flagship report on food security and nutrition. 

Kat: You are the Chief Economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization at the United Nations. What does that role entail? 

Maximo: Nice to see you, and happy to be here. The role of the chief economist is basically to work on all the socioeconomic analysis related to food security and nutrition. So as chief economist, I handle all the data and statistics for FAO. I handle everything related to poverty and hunger, to agrifood systems, to policies related to agricultural systems and trade issues, as well as issues related to investment and how we improve the way we produce, and how we can make it sustainable. That’s where the topic of food loss and waste becomes so important for us. The coverage is broad, and it links directly with what we call the Chief Scientist at FAO, who focuses more on the technologies and the science of each of the different sectors. Because FAO, as a Food and Agriculture Organization, doesn’t only look at the economic part, it also looks at fisheries and aquaculture, livestock, forestry, crops, and all the sectors we define as part of the agricultural system. 

Kat: And I think there’s quite a hefty statistic on agrifood systems, which account for 31% of global emissions. Is that correct? 

Maximo: More or less, but it depends how you look at it. Yes, around a third is correct, but that includes the whole value chain. So it also includes transportation and logistics, not only the production element. 

Kat: Help me break that down a little bit. So it’s everything, like you said. It’s farming and production, storage, processing, transport and retail, but also what happens when it reaches the consumer. 

Maximo: It’s the whole process from the farm to the mouth of the consumer. That’s essentially what the agrifood system implies, and that’s where the emissions come from, as a result of the whole process. It starts on the production side. If you use tractors, for example, you’re creating emissions. Then it moves into processing, then into transportation and logistics to the markets, to the supermarkets and retail stores. All of that process adds up to around a third of global emissions. That’s why it’s so important, because the food system doesn’t only produce emissions, which is normally how we look at it when we talk about the COPs. The food system gives you food, and it gives you the right to food. So everything good that you do has some externalities attached to it, and those are the externalities. That’s why the argument we keep making is this: there are two sectors that mainly explain most global emissions, energy and food systems. The energy sector has been resolving itself, through the private sector and the transformation of the energy mix we’ve been observing lately. The food system still has a big gap. It’s a sector that we need to bring climate financing to, because it’s where it will pay off the most, and that’s not happening. We have 3 to 4% of climate financing coming to the sector. So it’s important to understand that the sector is also providing the food you eat, but of course it will create externalities. 

Kat: What needs to happen for investment to come into this area? 

Maximo: The important thing to understand is that there has to be a different way of thinking about how we look at agrifood systems, because for the private sector it’s a risky sector, one facing a lot of risk and uncertainty. You’ve seen it lately with the Strait of Hormuz, before that the war in Ukraine, Covid-19. All these issues affect the logistics, affect the risk of the sector. And then you have climate. We have surpassed seven of the nine planetary boundaries, so we know we’ll see more intensity and frequency of climate events. It’s a sector facing serious risks and uncertainties. So the idea is, if we want to keep feeding people today and tomorrow, this is a sector we need to invest more in, to make it more resilient and to make sure we can provide the food we all need, in a sustainable way. That’s why one of our models at FAO is good food for all, for today and tomorrow. We normally focus a lot on today. Good food means a healthy diet today, but we forget about tomorrow. And to secure tomorrow, that’s where sustainability matters, where we need to be careful how we use our natural resources, our water, our biodiversity, our land, and how we reduce emissions, which are important externalities that ultimately affect the climate we’re facing today. 

Kat: You mentioned the Strait of Hormuz, and one of the things you’re looking at is shock resilience. The first thing that springs to mind is the state of the fertiliser sector. Can you tell me a little about what we’re facing today when it comes to that? 

Maximo: The major problem with what happened at the Strait of Hormuz is that between a quarter and a third of all agricultural inputs stopped, they were never resupplied. That created a huge supply shock. 30% of natural gas, 20% of nitrogen fertiliser, 30% of all types of fertiliser, sulphur, which is important for producing phosphate acids, all of it stopped overnight. That meant prices immediately started rising. We saw a huge increase in all prices, they went over $100. When the deal was signed they came back down to $70. Now they’re above $80, close to $90, because of what’s happened in the last few days. Energy prices went up, nitrogen fertiliser went up, DAP went up, sulphur went up. What does that mean when you’re already facing low commodity prices for cereals? For farmers, it means their margins are being squeezed. So they have to make a decision. They can produce the same and go into the red, using the same inputs. They can produce what they can with fewer inputs, which means lower yields in future. Or they can switch to commodities that use less nitrogen, moving to soybeans, or they move into biofuels. Those are the tough choices farmers have had to make, and that’s what they did. In the last planting season we saw a significant drop in urea consumption, and that will affect yields in the months ahead. We’ll see the real impact over the next year or two. On top of that, energy prices rose substantially, which made all the logistics around the food system more expensive. We found that 70% of irrigation pumping runs on diesel, so farmers are pumping less water, meaning less input, less water, potentially lower yields. And then there’s El Niño, which is potentially coming in at a very strong level. So it’s a sector facing a lot of challenges. But despite that, it’s showing itself to be a very resilient sector, coping as much as it can. Right now, farmers need help. They need financial support, and we need to find solutions to help them get through this difficult period. 

Kat: What are some of the solutions you’re looking at right now? 

Maximo: We organise our solutions into three blocks: short term, medium term, and long term, because this is a system that depends on the crop calendar, something we can’t change. So we have to respond to that calendar. In the short term, we’re saying we need to find alternative routes for inputs from other locations, and we found some countries that weren’t exporting before that could now export, which marginally improves the situation. It doesn’t resolve it, but it helps. Second, we need better information, and that’s where the Agricultural Market Information System we host, created by the G20 in France in 2011, matters. It shows the world the global availability of cereals, and I say cereals because they’re the crops that consume nitrogen most intensively, so they’re the most affected. Getting that information out is important because, as you saw at the start, when the world knew there were enough supplies from the previous harvest, prices didn’t spike as fast, because normally prices move on uncertainty. So the role of the system is to reduce that uncertainty. Third, we need to avoid export restrictions, which really matters for inputs. We managed to help avoid export restrictions, or shift them to quotas, in one major country, which released 1.5 million metric tonnes of urea to the world. We’re trying to monitor and discourage countries from putting those restrictions in place, because they only make the situation worse. And finally, social protection is the most important part, because the last thing you want in the short term is fiscal pressure. Flat subsidies across the board create a regressive situation that doesn’t benefit poorer consumers. Social protection needs to be better targeted. On logistics and emergency deployment, what WFP does in emergencies has been substantially hit by rising transportation costs. Just to give you an idea, moving wheat to Afghanistan used to be around 1,200 kilometres. Now it’s around 4,700 kilometres. That affects the budgets of humanitarian distribution work, so we need to build a buffer to help with that in future.  The medium-term solutions are more about supporting farmers financially. We need to increase access to credit. For formal farmers that’s straightforward, we can create credit lines with two to three years’ grace, so they have time before they need to repay. For informal farmers it’s more complex, because they don’t have records in the financial system, so there we’re coordinating with social protection, cooperatives, and farmer associations to make those arrangements work. And then there’s support for the most vulnerable countries, the ones importing both inputs and food, who are under debt stress. For those we’re proposing to reactivate the Food Import Financing Facility, which provides liquidity to cover the gap in their import bill for a period, to be repaid later. We’re also saying we need to be careful with biofuels, because if prices go above $100, biofuels become very attractive, which is good for farmers because it creates more demand for their produce, but it’s risky when there’s scarcity. We need to avoid subsidising biofuels in ways that pull supply away from food, because that ultimately hurts consumers.  There are three major policy recommendations longer term. First, this has happened before, with the Black Sea, with the Panama Canal drought and the congestion that caused. So we need a structural solution for input and energy supply. The International Energy Agency can manage and release stocks to stabilise situations in energy. We don’t have an equivalent for fertiliser. We need to diversify infrastructure across regions of the world to minimise that risk in future, and give ourselves a buffer while problems are being resolved. Second, pumping is central to this and mostly runs on diesel. The energy diversification we’ve seen elsewhere in the world hasn’t reached agriculture, and that needs to change, moving from diesel-based pumping and machinery to more diversified, renewable-based systems, like solar. And finally, on fertiliser alternatives, people like to jump to extremes, if there are no chemical fertilisers, let’s go fully organic, and we’ve seen that doesn’t work. There are innovations that can help. Two we’re watching closely: green ammonia, a clean replacement for nitrogen fertiliser, better than conventional nitrogen but currently around four times more expensive, so we need to keep funding innovation there, and a number of fertiliser companies are already working to scale it. The second is bio-fertilisers, but we need to understand they can only replace 15 to 20% of chemical fertilisers. They’re a piece of the solution, not the whole solution, because bio-fertilisers don’t provide all the micronutrients plants need, so you still need some chemical fertiliser alongside them. They’re also cheaper, but you need to be careful about heavy metal residues, comply with regulations, and understand your soil well enough to use them properly. Beyond that, there are practices that help retain more nitrogen in the soil, combining legumes and cereals like maize and wheat improves nitrogen efficiency. We need to keep investing in and scaling that kind of innovation, so the sector becomes more resilient to these kinds of shocks in future, some of which are genuinely high-risk investments. 

Kat: What role does public sector versus private sector investment play? 

Maximo: When I was at the World Bank, there was something called the cascade approach: everything the private sector can do, let the private sector do it. What it can’t do, governments step in for. One of the key roles of government is creating an enabling environment for investment, but that’s especially difficult in fragile countries under debt stress, it’s very hard to attract private investment there. That’s where first-loss risk matters, what we call blended finance. That’s the role of the multilateral development banks and international financial institutions, absorbing the first loss so companies decide to go in, because they know there’s a good business opportunity, but they’re wary of the risks the sector faces. Every player has a role: governments create enabling conditions, banks work with private companies to de-risk investment so the private sector can operate where it’s profitable, and where it isn’t, the public arm of the banks step in through loans or grants, depending on how difficult the country’s situation is. Institutions like FAO play a technical role, bringing the technical information that helps companies understand there’s a market, understand the profitability and the risks, so they can build a proper risk and financial case. Every year FAO and partner agencies release the State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, also called SOFI, and this year’s report comes out this month. 

Kat: You just launched the second part of it last night, at the high-level panel event in New York. What are some of the most recent findings you’re seeing in this report? 

Maximo: In the second part, specifically, because we’re still launching the headline numbers on the 21st. SOFI normally has two parts. One covers the numbers on the state of food security and nutrition in the world, the hunger numbers. The second is the more evidence-based, technical part. This year the topic is the cost of healthy diets. When you look at healthy diets, there are three components: the cost, which is linked to production; accessibility, which is linked to affordability and income; and consumption, because you can have the money to buy healthy food and still choose not to, and that’s more behavioural.  On the cost of a healthy diet, the major findings we presented yesterday: first, the cost of a healthy diet is $4.28 a day, in purchasing power parity terms per capita, which is 25% more expensive than five years ago. That’s significantly higher than the extreme poverty line of $3 a day. Second, calories are cheap, but nutrition is expensive. Staple foods make up about half our calories for a small share of the cost, while fruit, vegetables and animal-source foods carry most of the nutrients we need, and most of the price tag. So staples are cheap, calories are cheap, but dietary diversity is expensive. We also found that 70 to 75% of the cost is added after the farm, in storage, processing, transport, cold chains and wholesale markets, and that’s most relevant for high-value commodities like fruit, vegetables and animal proteins. In remote areas, the lack of proper infrastructure roughly doubles the price. And finally, we need to avoid problems like what happened with quinoa in my own country, Peru. Quinoa became hugely popular, demand surged, supply couldn’t keep up, and local prices rose so much that farmers who used to rely on it as a nutritious staple could no longer afford it themselves. We need to plan supply alongside demand, to minimise that kind of risk in future. 

Kat: Land degradation is often treated as something inevitable, but you’ve described it as something more to do with policy. Can you talk me through that? 

Maximo: As I said, we have a sector that produces food, and that’s your right to food, but it’s a sector that uses land, water and biodiversity. On land specifically, if we don’t use it properly, we degrade it. And we don’t want to expand the land we use, because that means clearing forests, which creates a mitigation problem, it reduces the world’s capacity to absorb emissions. So the question is, how do we achieve both goals: produce more, of better quality, while being sustainable, and if possible, turn the food system into a carbon sink. That’s where practices and technologies matter, because they help us look after our soil so we can keep using it in future, and they also let us regenerate land that’s already degraded, bringing it back into the food system. That’s the goal, to do both at the same time. 

Kat: Going from farming to what the consumer sees on their plate is quite a long journey. There’s food waste, but there are other issues along the way too. One of them is methane, which is responsible for, I think, over a 20-year period, trapping around 80 times more heat than CO2. What’s being worked on right now to tackle that? 

Maximo: We need to understand there are two different concepts here. When food moves from the farm to the wholesale market, that’s food loss. From the wholesale market to the consumer, that’s waste. In total, around a third of all food is lost or wasted, roughly 13% loss and 19% waste. Most of the emissions happen in the earlier part of the value chain, from producer to wholesale market, because that’s the investment of emissions that went into producing the food in the first place. So if we lose that food, we lose those emissions too. But there’s also a lot of methane released at the waste end, because wasted food often gets incinerated, and in many countries that happens, which makes methane emissions even worse. Both ends need attention. It depends on the product too. Livestock accounts for the majority of methane emissions, but the answer isn’t to stop producing livestock. There’s a lot of technical evidence on how important livestock is for nutrition, not just for protein but for micronutrients and other elements that people with lower nutrition, in parts of Africa for example, genuinely need. But there are also parts of the world that are overconsuming these products, and don’t need to. So the first solution is balance, there are regions that need more, and regions that are overconsuming, where we need to look at pricing to reduce unnecessary demand. The second is minimising emissions on the production side, better feeding and animal husbandry practices, and there’s a lot of work happening there, with some countries pushing to reduce livestock production significantly, and others focused on adopting new technologies. On waste, most of it isn’t happening at retail, in restaurants, or at wholesale, it’s happening at the household level, and that’s a question of behavioural change, helping people manage and use their food more carefully. Loss is harder to fix quickly, because it requires investment in things like cooling infrastructure and value chains, especially where there are lots of smallholder producers. Waste is comparatively easier, if we drive behavioural change and keep improving things like the apps that let you buy food cheaply from stores trying to avoid throwing it away. Those all help. But the behavioural piece is something we need to keep pushing.  Let me give you an example of what we’re trying to do, and we’re working with IKEA on this too. We’ve developed an app called the Food Waste Tracker. It tracks how much you waste. We started by implementing it on a small island, where resorts import almost everything and tend to waste a lot of food as a result. Consumers or kitchens sort what they waste into different buckets, and each bucket tells them how much water, emissions and nutrients they’ve lost, split across around 40 different food types, so we can calculate the real cost. It helped change consumer behaviour significantly, and it helped change kitchen behaviour too, because a lot of the loss and waste was actually happening there. We’ve now rolled that out across all our cafeterias at FAO, we have around 6,000 people in Rome, and you’ll see tablets at the waste stations telling you how much you’re wasting, and we’ve seen a real improvement. We’ve also moved into schools, because school feeding programmes provide food to kids in a controlled environment, and the goal is for that food to be nutritious. If a kid doesn’t eat what’s on their plate, that tells you something, maybe it wasn’t appealing, maybe it wasn’t right for them. Measuring what kids waste in that environment helps the people running these programmes adjust recipes while keeping the nutrition content, and it also helps change kids’ own behaviour, because they see what they’re wasting. IKEA also has a tool that uses AI to help find these kinds of solutions, and that’s where we’re building the connection between our work. 

Kat: So if food waste is the low-hanging fruit, and a big chunk of that happens at the consumer level, what’s the responsibility of the consumer versus large global organisations and governments? 

Maximo: I’d say both losses and waste have some low-hanging fruit in them. Losses require significant investment in infrastructure to reduce properly, but there are also simple solutions to specific problems that can cut losses and waste. On the consumer side, and for large corporates, it’s about awareness, what you’re doing with IKEA, what other big companies are doing, so we minimise waste and use the evidence to help people make better choices. Governments have a big role too, particularly on regulation, because what you want to guarantee is that food is safe. The food you buy in a supermarket or retail store should be safe, so as a consumer you’re not exposed to any health risk from the quality of what you’re eating. Food that doesn’t look perfect isn’t necessarily unsafe. So as long as food is safe, supermarkets can price it differently based on appearance, an avocado that doesn’t look beautiful but is perfectly safe to eat should be able to sell for half the price. Those are the kinds of mechanisms regulators and governments need to put in place, and improve, because some regulations right now are too strict, and by definition that creates more waste. The other piece is nutrition, and that’s where healthy diets come in, a diversity of foods that gives your body the macro and micronutrients it needs. It’s not about extremes, fully vegan on one end or meat-heavy on the other, it’s about diversity. A Mediterranean diet is a good example of a healthy diet. So our focus is on how we make healthy diets more affordable and reduce their cost, which is what this year’s SOFI report is about, understanding what interventions actually help reduce that cost. That means interventions in value chains, so fruit and vegetables reach the market more cheaply and people can buy them at a lower price. Second is affordability, which comes down to income, and reducing hunger and poverty. And the third is that people may have the income and still choose not to consume a healthy diet, and that’s where we’re pushing for behavioural change, helping people and governments understand that if you don’t eat a healthy diet, you’re more likely to end up overweight or obese, and adult overweight is rising substantially, which leads to non-communicable diseases like heart disease. We need to think about tomorrow’s consequences of what we eat today, and that matters both for policymakers and for consumers. If I’m trying to convince a Ministry of Finance to invest more in improving value chains so there’s more fruit and vegetables in the market, I’d argue it this way: today you might be able to satisfy hunger with calories, but if you’re not careful, you’ll be paying a huge health bill down the line. We’ve calculated the hidden cost of agriculture at around $11 trillion, of which $8 trillion is health-related. 

Kat: Eight trillion, wow. Across everything you’re working on right now, what’s the one thing that keeps you up at night? 

Maximo: Plenty of things keep me up at night. Right now, my biggest concern is what’s happening in the world more broadly. The world has changed a lot in recent years. We started with Covid-19, which was an uncertain risk, but now we’re seeing a lot of geopolitics entering trade. Trade has moved from just in time to just in case, which brings a lot of inefficiency. My job right now is making sure we can put out information that helps people understand the real situation, to minimise the uncertainty that pushes prices higher. Just to give you an idea, a 1% increase in energy prices normally translates to around 0.3 to 0.4% in food prices. Under uncertainty, that same 1% increase can translate into 0.6 to 0.7%, almost double. So minimising that uncertainty is my first priority, making sure we can provide the information that reduces those risks. But beyond that, one of our central goals is improving access to healthy diets. 2.6 billion people, 1 in 3 people in the world, don’t have access to a healthy diet. That doesn’t make sense, and it’s something that needs to change. Everything we’ve talked about today is part of the same puzzle we need to solve to avoid that problem getting worse. 

Kat: With COP31 coming up, it seems like there’ll be a bigger focus on food security, waste, and methane reduction than we’ve seen previously. What are your expectations for COP this year? 

Maximo: We started at COP28 in the UAE, where there was a lot of emphasis, Mariam brought real focus to the links between food security and climate, which is central, as I said, two sectors, energy and agrifood systems, explain most emissions, and most of the financing still goes to energy, very little to agrifood systems, 3 to 4%. That needs to change dramatically. Since then we’ve had meetings pushing to accelerate that shift, and our expectation is that we need to keep accelerating it. The vertical climate funds are starting to move more meaningfully toward food systems, and we need to keep pushing on that, but the sector clearly needs significantly more investment, and that’s what I hope we can move forward on. The more evidence we bring on the consequences of not acting now, the better. We have so much evidence already on what this sector needs to keep giving people the right to food, while reducing the externalities, the emissions, the pressure on biodiversity. It’s time to really shift that number from 4% toward 30 or 40%, whatever it takes to unlock the investment this system needs. 

Kat: And a final question for you. What gives you hope for the future? 

Maximo: What gives me hope is that this sector keeps showing up. If you think back to Covid-19, everyone panicked, but at the end of the day, you still had food on your plate. You could go and queue at the supermarket and get food. In Ukraine, everyone worried, because one of the key exporters of wheat and sunflower oil stopped exporting overnight, but you didn’t see real shortages. Prices went up, but food was there. Even the fertiliser shock we talked about, one of the toughest, removing a quarter to a third of all inputs overnight, we still have food available, even if prices are higher. What gives me hope is that this sector keeps trying, keeps pushing, and I think it’s starting to attract young people. I come from a country where the average age of a farmer is around 50. In Japan it’s around 67, in Europe it’s over 50. But in my own country, Peru, we’re exporting a lot of high-value commodities, initially on the coast, and now moving into the Andes. I’m seeing a real shift, young people drawn in by the technology, bringing what they’ve learned at university, and agribusiness is now one of the best-paid sectors in the country. I see a lot of opportunity in Africa too, where there’s such a large youth population, we can create jobs through this sector and make it genuinely attractive for the future. 

Kat: Very nice. Maximo, it’s been great talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. 

Maximo: A pleasure. Thank you so much.