Interview with Lauren Phillips

In this edition of the Food Systems podcast, speaking during an interview at this year's Forum for the Future of Agriculture Annual Conference, Alex Turk talks to Lauren Phillips, FAO's Director of Partnerships and UN Collaboration. Lauren reflects on her panel at the Forum’s Annual Conference about financing agricultural transition, arguing that progress requires tackling nutrition, productivity, climate and livelihoods together rather than in isolation, and expressing encouragement that climate and agriculture were discussed jointly, though she'd like to see more focus on social and nutrition outcomes. She frames climate change as an open-ended, generational crisis that intersects with conflict and resource pressures to drive hunger, and notes that declining climate finance budgets mean development funding alone won't suffice - private finance must also be de-risked to reach even the poorest smallholder farmers, who represent both high risk and high potential payoff. She closes by emphasising that building broad, durable consensus, even if slower, produces more lasting and ambitious outcomes than settling for quick fixes.