Food Security

The attack on Iran by U.S. and Israeli forces and Iranian retaliation against U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf have roiled energy markets by disrupting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz—the Gulf’s only sea passage to the open ocean. About 27% of the world’s oil exports, 20% of global liquified natural gas (LNG) exports, and 20%-30% of global fertilizer exports, including urea, ammonia, phosphates, and sulfur, pass through the Strait.

Natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses computational techniques to interpret, analyze, and generate human language, encompasses a range of tasks and techniques. These include the large language models (LLMs) that power chatbots and other types of systems, as well as specific approaches (some employed by LLMs), including information extraction and text mining.NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger).

The global poverty landscape is increasingly shaped by conflict, climate shocks, displacement, and market disruptions—forces that are concentrating extreme poverty in the most fragile settings. At the same time, humanitarian and development financing is under pressure, heightening the need for  scalable and cost-effective approaches to poverty reduction. Graduation models—multifaceted interventions designed to help extremely poor households to “graduate” from poverty—are emerging as a particularly promising response in this context.

Currently, 80% of the world’s people rely on just three agricultural commodities as primary food staples: Maize, rice, and wheat. Production of these staple foods is concentrated in a small number of countries and regions, often called “breadbaskets.” At the same time, the incidence of climate-driven droughts, storms, floods, and related shocks is on the rise, creating large-scale threats to agricultural production in these areas. Recent research suggests that climate change will increase both the volatility of agricultural output and correlations across regions.

The realities of a changing climate are becoming increasingly clear, with temperatures rising around the world and extreme weather events, like flooding and droughts, becoming more and more frequent. April 2025 was the second hottest April globally on record, and evidence suggests such anomalous high temperatures could become the norm rather than the exception.