Sonny Ramaswamy, former director of the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture and former Oregon State University College of Agricultural Sciences dean, now serves on the Committee on World Food Security’s High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition.
Ramaswamy was appointed in the fall. He is one of 15 members on the panel, which helps the FAO develop policies and action plans for “critical and emerging issues.”
Appointees serve a two-year term, with the option to serve for another two years.
“The work has now become even more urgent,” Ramaswamy said. “People are dying because of hunger or people are dying because of too much food, metabolic disorders and things like that.”
Humanity had made “pretty significant progress” addressing hunger by the year 2000, with hunger dropping “pretty significantly,” Ramaswamy said.
Following COVID-19, locusts out of Yemen and Arabia and various global conflicts, “it’s almost like the perfect storm,” he said. “While we had made progress, we have fallen behind and more people are going hungry.”
Appointees serve a two-year term, with the option to serve for another two years.
The panel meets twice a year. Ramaswamy attended the first meeting in Rome in January.
Ramaswamy was at OSU from 2009 to 2012. He was appointed NIFA director by President Barack Obama in 2012, and served until 2018.
America ‘AWOL’
Ramaswamy points to cuts in U.S. research and humanitarian aid programs, including the dissolution of USAID.
“America’s involvement in addressing hunger and health, basically, we’re AWOL,” Ramaswamy said. “America has always been the anchor; it’s the soft power that we’ve used.”
He also cites the U.S. pulling out of 66 global agencies, reducing funding for federal agencies with global impacts and research for global diseases, including avian influenza.
Ramaswamy points to a report from the Council on Foreign Relations that in 2025 Americans spent more money on Halloween candy, $3.9 billion, than the government did on humanitarian aid, $3.4 billion.
“Forever, America has been the beacon,” he said. “Other wealthy countries, as well, are not stepping up.”
