text: Honorable ministers, distinguished participants, ladies, and gentlemen.
  I am extremely pleased to take part in the opening of this year’s World Food Summit live from Copenhagen. This is an important Summit, addressing some of our time’s most fundamental issues.
  As patron of the Danish public-private-partnership Food Nation, I have followed the developments of the national as well as global food systems closely. I personally had the privilege to open the last Summit – held in 2019.
  Since then, the global health pandemic has changed the world by causing major disruptions to every part of our societies. This includes our food systems. Much of what we have been trying to accomplish is suddenly under threat.
  That is exactly what Today’s Summit is about. We are gathered today – some present in the room, many more participating online – to collectively find ways to accelerate the actions necessary to transform food systems to become safer, healthier, and more sustainable.
  To enable resilient, affordable, safe, and nutritious diets for the current and growing global population while restoring and safeguarding our environment, we need to find innovative solutions to transform our food systems. It must support change at every stage of the food chain, from our farmers and fishermen, through to marketing, consumption, and end use. This is the challenge facing us.
  Today, almost a billion people lack sufficient food and another billion suffer from the lack of essential nutrients in their diets. And this number is once again on the rise.
  At the same time, almost two billion people in the world are now considered overweight or obese. Both hunger and obesity are often consequences of lack of access to enough healthy food. This paradoxical and depressing development has sadly been going on for decades now.
  On top of that, we find ourselves in a global ecosystem that is under great stress. We are pushing our own life-support systems so far that they are struggling to cope with what we ask of them.
  We must do more today to avert the calamities of tomorrow and we can only do that by re-framing the way we approach our food systems all around the world.
  The stepping-stones ahead have been laid out. As we have entered this Decade of Action, the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement remain our road maps to solving our common challenges. We also know that game-changing innovations are in the making.
  Innovations that are critical for the profound transformation of our global food system. We must begin to address the barriers to making the solutions workable and accessible.
  If we are to meet the global targets, we must pull together. We need the right incentives, scientists and technology experts need to innovate, the business sector needs to identify and grasp new opportunities, and civil society must push even harder.
  I am pleased to note that we have people working hard on the case, and I am confident that we will succeed together, and take yet another groundbreaking step towards our common goal.
  Let me end by quoting one of the world’s great innovators, Mr. Thomas Edison, who famously said, "There is a way to do it better – find it!"
  I wish you all a successful Summit!
  Thank you.
  