One area charities may want to pay greater attention to is food systems and nutrition, an issue President Tharman Shanmugaratnam describes as a "looming crisis" that has yet to receive adequate focus.
Speaking at the Philanthropy Asia Summit (PAS) on May 5, Tharman, who is also the patron of the Philanthropy Asia Alliance (PAA), highlighted the urgent need to rethink food production and sustainability. He was speaking on a panel alongside Bill Gates, the chair and trustee of the Gates Foundation. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Lewis, strategic partnerships lead and co-head of collaboration and partnerships at Temasek Trust.
"We've reached the limits because it is too large a source of greenhouse gas emissions. We can't keep encroaching into natural forests and other natural ecosystems, and also because soil health has deteriorated very significantly," he says, highlighting that there has been a marked decrease in the moisture in the soil over the last 20 years.
The lack of moisture means that the soil will be much more susceptible to droughts and less able to be a sink for carbon. The lack of moisture will also mean that such soil is less able to grow plants with a reasonable yield, which leads to a "real problem" in how the world will grow its food in future, he explains.
While supply is constrained, demand for food is expected to increase along with the world's growing population.
"We have about 1.7 billion people who are going to be part of the world in the next 25 years. In fact, in the next 10 years, we have about 800 million people," Tharman notes.
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Add to that, the world will see a "much larger" increase in demand for food nutrition because a large group of the poor and low-middle-income population are now becoming or aspiring to become the middle class.
As such, the world needs a new "green revolution", which uses less water, allows more moisture to remain in the soil, involves less methane emissions that come from rice, rapid gas emissions in general, and a system that still gives farmers a better deal, says Tharman.
This is one of the initiatives that the PAA is working on with partners, including the Gates Foundation.
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So far, the large-scale trials in India and other parts of the region have been "extremely productive" with the trials finding "significant improvements" in farmers' yields, a 50% reduction in water requirements and 20% less methane emissions.
To this end, food systems and nutrition is a "large challenge" which involves everyone. "If we don't solve it, first, many more people in the world are going to go hungry, and everyone else is going to see an increase in the cost of living, because food prices are going to go up," says Tharman.
"So we really need to focus on this, transform how rice is cultivated, in order that farmers still have good incomes and populations can have good nutrition, including the poor, especially, and the cost of living doesn't need to go up," he adds.
