(ITALY)
Tackling hunger is the number one priority for the world’s leading food innovation summit.
Seeds&Chips, which Innovators Magazine is a media partner with, takes place in Milan this May, under the patronage of the World Food Programme (WFP) Italia. And the organisers of the summit will be donating a percentage of the ticket price to support WFP’s efforts to address malnutrition in Nigeria.
“This year, we have once again enthusiastically joined the WFP’s initiatives and we are happy to be able to contribute to aiding the Nigerian people. The Summit has always united food, sustainability, and innovation through partnerships between startups, companies, opinion leaders and global media to address larger themes within food and the new solutions that technological development can offer, not just for the most economically advanced countries but particularly for those populations who live in poverty and struggle with a scarcity of resources,” said Marco Gualtieri, President and founder of Seeds&Chips.
The event will also promote the ShareTheMeal app, pioneered by WFP. It allows people to donate food with a tap of their smartphone to groups of people around the world who are starving to death, by providing a meal for just US $0.50. It is available in 10 languages and accepts 30 currencies.
“Since ShareTheMeal’s launch two years ago, more than one million people have downloaded the app and have shared more than 21 million meals with thousands of hungry children, in order to support WFP’s most critical food emergencies,” explained Massimiliano Costa, Head of ShareTheMeal. “In the world, smartphones outnumber hungry children 20 to 1. This means that if we join our forces and donate through ShareTheMeal, we can reach zero hunger. For this reason I thank WFP Italia and Seeds&Chips for giving the possibility to all Summit’s participants to support WFP operations in North East Nigeria, where ShareTheMeal is aiming to provide life-saving food assistance for 100 days to those children most at risk.”
And Robert Opp, Director of Innovation and Change Management at WFP, says “innovation has a crucial role to play in the fight against hunger” – and he praised events like Seeds&Chips for playing an important role in shining a spotlight on the scale of the challenges, as well as showcasing the potential solutions.
He added: “The availability of new technologies and approaches today presents a tremendous opportunity. We need to test these approaches to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then scale up the most promising innovations.”
Seeds&Chips 2018 will be held from 7 to 10 May, at MiCo Milano Congressi.
Zero Hunger is UN Sustainable Development Goal 2. Our reporter and impact comms lead, Carlotta De Toni, will be discussing all 17 SDGs on Instagram over the next few weeks – join her in discussing how we can best achieve them.
