Food Production Fosters Sustainable Development

[Applause] thank you I'm very glad to be speaking here today because food has always been something very very close to my heart since a very young age I became an orphan when I was 7 years old and that is the time that I learned how to work to put food on my plate and I was out of school when I was 9 years old because I could not afford to go to school in the morning come back home work so I can have maze meal to make um our only meal of the day I left school when I was 9 and when I was 10 I was offered to marry a guy who was 30 years my senior so I could have food on my plate and so from that background I understand food as something that can change change a lot of the major issues of our time starting from CH Early Childhood marriages violence against women especially in the part of the world where I come from and when I refuse to get married as a 10-year-old the person who was arranging to marry me or told me you have turned down all the help that I offered to give you and I want you to know that from now on you on your own and that was me at 10 when I was 11 years old I learned about mushrooms and that was the turning point for me I learned to farm mushrooms as a young girl of 11 years old and that was the first time I experienced how to put food on my table in the easiest way than I had been doing before I was trying to farm we had a piece of land that belonged to my grandmother who was already over 100 years old and I was farming at the end of each day all I had was just stalks with no corn on it and I could not do anything with it when I learned to farm mushrooms I discovered to grow mushrooms you use agricultural waste that is available in all the poor families in any any place we can say this is a struggling country as long as they practice some form of Agriculture they will have this kind of worte material growing up is an Oran subsaharan Africa I was one of the 34 million orphans who at one point have to be married off so they can have food on their plate or they have to withstand different forms of abuse so they can eat food before they go to bed in Zimbabwe alone where we have a population of 14 thou 14 million people 1.5 of that are orphans and about 3.5 of them they go to bed hungry now as a young girl girl of 11 finding out that by converting agricultural waste I can produce food I set out to understanding deeply about the art of cultivating mushrooms and simplifying it so we can reach as many people as possible and for me my commitment was to reach young orphans who were going through the same situation like I had to go through as a young girl mushrooms are very high in pren they also have a bit of carbohydrates and they have a lot of essential amino acids as well so they're very healthy food as a as a food but they also work as a medicine and I went as a young girl of 12 to a university where I spend time learning more about mushrooms learning how I can grow mushrooms from different kinds of wte material and this is from corn stalks from chicken manure from cang but also coffee and that is me when I was starting to grow mushrooms as a young girl and without any understanding of Science and of course I decided I would simplify and travel to different places in the world and adjust the growing spaces mushrooms are growing in very small space but most of the times it's made to be a sterile environment where you have to do a lot of work sterilizing everything and I figured out a model how to simplify that so village women in Zimbabwe can do it on one square meter of land you can produce 75 Kg of mushrooms in 3 months and this is a lot of food especially when you consider that 1 kilogram of these mushrooms can be sold for 7 American dollars in a country where a lot of the times people who are suffering with HIV and AIDS they don't even get a dollar to get a supply of their medication for a month young girls who have an opportunity to go to school they have to stop going to school when they're having their period because they can't buy San sanitary pads for when they have their period and in some cases they were actually using cow dong because they don't have anything else to use so for me it was important to simplify that and so we are growing mushrooms in different structures that can be built using what the people have available and for me this defines the future of food empowering people capacitating people to use what they have where they are to produce food learning from their cultural practices I was harvesting mushrooms in the forest with my grandmother as a young girl of seven and so cultivating mushrooms is really building on a tradition that has been there for a long time and only now lost in the name of civilization and so we are working now with groups of women in different places children and Men together teaching them how to use the worst materials that they have to grow mushrooms and one would wonder I mean yes you grow 75 Kg of mushrooms on a square meter what amounts of waste and how does that work so you get if you have 100 100 kg of waste you get 50 kg of mushrooms and then you have a worst material that you can use as a fertilizer for growing other food and so this is the work that we are doing with local communities Awakening individual persons with the little resources that they have that they can contribute towards the future of food production and what I believe in personally is that food production has to belong in the hands of everyone everyone has to own the means of producing their own food and everything every systems that we develop going forward in food production have to be adjusted so they can fit in the local practices of every place in question and we need to build collaborations that helps us to understand Beyond just what we do in our little circle because the work that I have done with mushrooms that as a young girl who wanted to put food on her plate to helping communities around me but also to impacting the lives of others globally where we train entrepreneurs actually through converting coffee the worst from coffee that you have in your tea into mushrooms because for all the coffee that's produced in the world the what what we drink is only 2% of what is produced in total and the rest 90 98 98% 99% is thrown away and we take that West material first on the farm convert that into mushrooms and then we go into cafes we have this happening here in the USA in San Francisco where I train them to convert West material from coffee from the cafes from the Starbucks into mushrooms and we have adjusted the method of production so it can be implemented in different places in the basement of this place now we can turn it into a mushroom house and [Applause] and for us this is something that is important so in short I would say the future of food for me means collaborations that matter and this is a bit what between me and the people from Mad where I grow food and I see what they do as the chefs and we actually plan to have a big event in Zimbabwe where we will produce food and we will work on processing that food together this year and these collaborations are what is going to change and everyone taking responsibility is going to redefine and reshape the future of food where we all act responsibly to change it thank you [Applause]