President Higgins addressed the 2025 World Food Forum Grand Opening via video message.
The vital need for food security, and the importance of moving past reactive emergency responses to tackling the underlying structural causes of hunger, has been a key theme of the President’s work.
The President has consistently raised the importance of food security, and the links between it and the interlocking global crises of global poverty, migration, debt and climate change in his meetings with global leaders in recent years.
In October 2023, President Higgins delivered two addresses on the topic of food security at the World Food Forum, hosted at the FAO’s headquarters in Rome, one at the Forum’s opening session as well as the keynote address the Forum’s closing session. The President’s addresses in Rome built on a further two addresses which he delivered at the second Dakar Summit on food sovereignty and resilience in Senegal in January 2023.
The President has also written extensively on the topic in recent years, including reflecting on the repeated crises which have arisen since he first travelled to Somalia and saw first-hand the devastation of the famine in that country in 1992.