Since the beginning of 2020, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic have been sweeping the world. The implementation of movement restrictions to control the outbreak has inevitably led to the suspension of economic activities, accompanied by an unprecedented global economic crisis. In turn, the disruption of the global supply chain has raised fears of a food crisis from which food-importing developing countries can disproportionally suffer. By October 2020, as many governments across the world began to ease lockdown restrictions and started to slowly reopen their economies, the COVID-19 epicentre has shifted to developing countries whose agriculture sector has been already stressed due to climate change.  Given the magnitude of health and economic emergencies, the UN has predicted a worsening humanitarian crisis with the rise in the number of people suffering from food and nutrition insecurity.

The challenges facing the global community today, including climate crisis and zoonotic diseases due to environmental degradation, are emerging too rapidly, evolving too fast, becoming increasingly too complex, and affecting too many dimensions of our planet as well as our lives to sustain the resilience of the global food system. The triple crises of climate change, COVID-19, and food insecurity in developing countries are indeed intricately interlinked. Reversing climate change, preventing disease outbreak, and addressing food security in developing countries have to go hand-in-hand through developing and scaling up of climate-smart sustainable agricultural intensification technologies, which contribute to improving yields and resource-use efficiencies while conserving the environment. 

Since its establishment as the Tropical Agricultural Research Center (TARC) in 1970, JIRCAS has been a front-runner in Japan's efforts to collaborate with partners from developing regions and international organizations through joint agricultural research projects. JIRCAS is geared to deal with the above challenges affecting the global food system by taking advantage of its strength based on its 50-year experience of research with partners in developing countries.

This event is expected to promote discussions with JIRCAS’ partners on the challenges affecting the global food system, including those emerging with and likely to evolve after the COVID-19 period. JIRCAS and its partners will exchange views and opinions on how to develop an effective, impact-oriented mode of international research collaboration in order to deal with the above challenges by working with cross-disciplinary teams and by strengthening of ties with implementing partners to develop/disseminate/scale-up technologies swiftly and widely.