DuPont Commemorates World Food Day 2015

United Arab Emirates, October 14, 2015 – DuPont will join this year’s global celebrations of World Food Day on October 16, 2015. The day is celebrated widely to raise public awareness about hunger challenges and encourage people worldwide to take actions in the fight against hunger and find sustainable solutions to end food shortage. 

In line with this, DuPont has expressed its continued commitment to help end hunger and ensure food security. “Today, the world faces unprecedented obstacles brought on, in part, by a soaring global population and the need for more and more nutritious food to feed us all – has particularly captured our attention as a company. DuPont plays a significant role along the entire food value chain, which is why this issue has become a central focus for us,” said Ghislain Desjardins, General Manager, DuPont UAE. 

“In 2012, we set ambitious goals to help end world hunger. We committed $10 billion to Research & Development and the introduction of 4,000 new products, we set up programs and partnerships to improve rural communities, and we promised to facilitate two million youth engagements around the world by 2020. Meeting this goal is a source of pride – but to me it indicates that the need is much more pressing than what we anticipated. Hence we need to aggressively address these sweeping challenges and engage an entire new generation to this critical task,” he added. 

DuPont is the sponsor of The Global Food Security Index (GFSI) designed and constructed by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The index studies beyond hunger to the underlying factors affecting food insecurity and considers the core issues of affordability, availability, and quality across a set of 109 countries. 

According to the 2015 Global Food Security Index (GFSI), the GCC has made significant progress in food security between 2014 and 2015. United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have improved substantially since the inception of the Index in 2012, where the UAE has recorded an improvement of 2.5 points. The region has extremely high food affordability and has an average food security score close to the regional average of Europe.