The Food And Agricultural Organization (FAO) celebrates its 80th anniversary today, marking eight decades of work to eliminate hunger and build healthier, more sustainable agrifood systems.

The FAO was established on 16 October 1945 and the UN agency celebrates this achievement as World Food Day every year on its birthday, recognizing the work of all those who are committed to ensuring food for everyone.

This year’s World Food Day, marked today, October 16, 2025, carries special meaning as the FAO marks 80 years of working with Members to end hunger and malnutrition. It also carries the theme; “Hand in Hand for Better Foods and a Better Future.”

The theme, chosen by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), calls on people everywhere to work together in reshaping how the world produces, distributes and consumes food.

World leaders, scientists and activists have gathered for the World Food Forum 2025, hosted at FAO headquarters. Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella, and Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, joined Spain’s Queen Letizia and Pope Leo XIV for the occasion, all emphasising shared responsibility for a food-secure future.

Food security also remains deeply tied to geopolitics. Despite nearly four years of war, Ukraine continues to play a crucial role as one of the world’s breadbaskets.

According to the World Food Programme, Ukrainian grain fed 152 million people last year, reaching vulnerable regions such as Yemen and Ethiopia. Yet, export volumes fell by nearly 40 per cent this September as Russian strikes again targeted key Black Sea ports.

FAO’s message this year is that consumers, too, have power. Choosing locally produced foods, wasting less, and supporting sustainable brands are all steps toward a fairer system. As FAO put it, “The choices we make every day shape the world we live in.”

FAO Director-General Qu Dongyu, in his address to delegates, asserted that the challenge of food security demands unity among nations.

“The world’s leaders and people everywhere must come together united by our collective belief that the right to food is a basic human right, and that peace is a prerequisite for food security.”
Qu Dongyu

Pope Urges End To World Hunger In FAO Speech

Pope Leo made an urgent appeal to global leaders to end world hunger. Speaking at the FAO headquarters in Rome, the Pontiff also condemned the use of hunger as a weapon of war.

Leo cited UN data that revealed about 673 million people were not eating enough each day, calling that number “the clear sign of a prevailing insensitivity, of a soulless economy … and of an unjust and unsustainable system of resource distribution.”

“In a time when science has lengthened life expectancy, allowing millions of human beings to live – and die – struck by hunger is a collective failure, an ethical derailment, a historic offence.

“The scourge of hunger … continues to atrociously plague a significant portion of humanity.”
Pope Leo

In his speech to 125 delegations attending a weeklong forum coinciding with the FAO’s 80th anniversary, Pope Leo cited in particular “Ukraine, Gaza, Haiti, Afghanistan, Mali, the Central African Republic, Yemen, and South Sudan,” among other countries “where poverty has become the daily bread.”

The Pope, speaking mainly in Spanish, said that today’s conflicts “have seen the re-emergence of the use of food as a weapon of war.”

“International humanitarian law, without exception, prohibits attacks on civilians and on goods essential to the survival of populations.

“This seems forgotten, for, painfully, we witness the continued use of that cruel strategy. We cannot continue like this, since hunger is not humanity’s destiny but its downfall.”
Pope Leo

Leo, the first US Pope, spent much of his career before the papacy as a missionary in Peru and has made caring for the poor a focus of his five-month tenure.