‘Stop this obscenity’: could key UK summit turn tide on world hunger?

The UK development minister, Andrew Mitchell, is staring down a test tube in a Surrey laboratory. He is looking at a specimen of the fall armyworm, a pest with a voracious appetite that can munch its way through an African maize crop at astonishing speed.

The moth arrived on the African continent from the Americas in 2016, and has spread to 28 countries, gorging its way through maize, wheat and cotton at an alarming rate. Only the desert locust and the brown marmorated stink bug have been more destructive to arable farming.

Mitchell’s visit to the Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience International (Cabi) comes ahead of a global food security summit in London next week, hosted by the UK government. “It is going to come up with some very practical proposals,” Mitchell believes.

The aim of the summit is “to demonstrate and interrogate the huge contribution that science, research and British academic institutions are making to the global problem of starvation and malnutrition”, he says.

The lab, which is partly funded by the UK, combines research with practical advice, holding online clinics in locations including Kenya and Pakistan. It claims to have reached 60 million smallholder farmers since 2011.

About 40% of food production worldwide is lost to pests and diseases, and one of Cabi’s strengths is its ability to spot trends in plant diseases. Its scientists say they are engaged in looking for nature-based solutions.

If a local clinic cannot identify a disease, the plant is sent as a sample to Cabi headquarters for identification against its catalogue of 38,000 organisms.

Mitchell says that, “for the global good”, the world needs to get away from pesticides and find ways to cut the cost of natural solutions and make them more user-friendly. “If we tackle food disease naturally, it is better for the environment, the soil, people.”

Cabi is an unassuming piece of British soft power, says Mitchell, who was international development secretary under David Cameron and returned to lead the UK’s development brief in October 2022.

He is determined to restore Britain’s reputation as a development superpower, and the food summit, combined with publication of a white paper, is the culmination of his work to reduce the mess left by Boris Johnson’s cuts to spending on aid and closure of the Department for International Development. Mitchell wants the summit to show the public that aid works.

It is his ill fortune that the summit comes as the siege in Gaza, supported by the UK government, is taking a terrible toll on a civilian population. UN agencies have estimated that more than 1.6 million people in Gaza are in critical need of aid.

Mitchell is determined to compartmentalise the issues, but if the Gaza crisis continues, it may be hard to do so at the summit.

While sympathetic to Israel, Mitchell has a record that suggests he might not be supporting its methods if not for cabinet collective responsibility. In 2014, during a smaller outburst of violence in Gaza, he called for an arms embargo to be imposed on Israel.

“There are very strict rules governing the conduct of international warfare, and the UN and the schools, which are places of sanctuary in Gaza, clearly should not be attacked,” he said then.

For now, he promises the food security summit will try to answer the broader question of “how to stop the obscenity of children starving to death from malnutrition in a world where there is plenty of food”, and how to tackle the problem of food waste, pointing to the fact that 40% of all food grown is never eaten.

This is not a conference at which donors will be asked to pledge funds, Mitchell says, but a chance to highlight the scientific work being undertaken to fight hunger and malnutrition.

He has long been a fan of Plumpy’Nut, marvelling that “you can give this peanut-based paste to a malnourished child, and within half an hour they will be running around playing football”. Trialled in Niger 17 years ago, the vitamin- and protein-loaded paste has been given to millions of severely malnourished children. It does not need to be cooked or refrigerated, and stays fresh after opening.

Mitchell has been on this beat for long enough to have seen some grim sights, and is especially haunted by hospital wards in Yemen. “It is often the same combination: a deeply malnourished child with a wide-eyed terrified mother by her side on the bed.

“And sometimes, what has stood between them and death is British taxpayers’ money,” he says.

But he has also seen food rotting by the side of the road in central Africa because farmers cannot transport their product to market or had no cold storage. As the climate crisis grips, he fears this waste will worsen.

He wants his white paper to take British development policy to 2030 in a way that Labour, if elected, could also broadly adopt, and that would get the UN sustainable development goals back on track.

It will also look at how to develop the Bridgetown Initiative proposed by the prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, and the reform of the global financial system.

Mitchell hopes the summit will have an impact beyond development professionals. He has used previous summits, including ones on vaccination and family planning, to persuade sceptics that aid works.

“You can take taxpayers with you,” he says, “but only if you keep making the argument.”

Photograph: Jake Lyell/Alamy - An armyworm devours a farmer's maize in Kenya. One of the summit’s aims is to sharing ideas on how to tackle voracious pests through sustainable natural methods.