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While walking through the mud among the improvised tented shelters of an informal camp housing Syrian refugees in Jordan, I was approached by a desperate mother and her young disabled son. Amina showed me a hand-written prescription of the medication she needed but had been unable to obtain, after losing access to medical assistance. As the war in Syria drags on, humanitarian actors have shifted from emergency response towards longer term development aid, affecting the assistance available to people living outside formal refugee camps.

By 2050 the global population is expected to increase up to 9.8 billion people (UNDESA, 2017). Accordingly, food production will have to increase by 60 percent for food requirements to be met (FAO, 2015). This poses a big challenge for food systems as they have to achieve this sustainably. With the global scenario having changed drastically due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these already existing food security concerns have been heightened. The pandemic threatens to add to the 820 million people living in chronic hunger, as the measures adopted to stop the spread can hinder food production as well as people’s ability to purchase food.

Headlines on ‘Food Bank Britain’ have featured increasingly in our newspapers since the global financial crash in 2008, documenting the struggle of many people who rely on emergency food aid to feed themselves and their families.

PhD student Nick Fradgley travelled to Ethiopia in 2019, with the support of the Cambridge Global Food Security Early Career Researcher Travel Fund, to conduct research on how teff, sorghum, finger millet, and durum wheat are bred. Find out how he planned his trip, what he learned, and how this has broadened his views on the complex issues that surround food security in Ethiopia.