There’s nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being.

With climate change and health crises rightfully receiving international attention, the time has come to focus on hunger as a top priority. WHO regards hunger and malnutrition as the gravest threat to public health, and climate change threatens to further destabilise already fragile food-production systems.

This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. We know how to fix hunger.

Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes — the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things — there is nothing to fall back on.

If a child in its first thousand days - from conception to two years old - does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible.

There’s nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food — the most fundamental expectation of every human being.

If any good comes out of the current famine in the Horn of Africa - amidst the pictures of mothers carrying dying babies at their shrivelled breasts and hollow-eyed children with swollen bellies and matchstick limbs - it will be galvanising the world on the need to ensure access to nutritious food for the world's most vulnerable people.