The Camden Conference and Portland Public Library will host Robert Moore on January 11 at 6:30 p.m. His talk “Recent Developments in Global Food Security and the Challenges Ahead” will be on Zoom. Click HERE to watch.

After a period in which the damaging effects of hunger had been declining, progress has been reversed and the number of people without a healthy food supply has been increasing in recent years. An estimated 700 million people around the world are presently affected by chronic hunger.  Major contributing factors are climate change and conflict and social unrest, particularly in Africa and the Middle East. Poverty is the main reason people go hungry and recent increases in global food prices have exacerbated the situation.

A native of Los Angeles with Bachelor and Master degrees from UCLA, Bob Moore spent his professional career with two Agencies of the United Nations system: the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in Nairobi from 1974-1983 and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) from 1983-2013. He worked primarily on the evaluation of the agencies’ projects and programs. In 2009, he was appointed to a four-year term as the first Director of FAO’s newly created Independent Office of Evaluation where he served until his retirement in 2013. In his UN career, he worked in some 80 developing countries in all regions of the world.