Each week, Food Tank is rounding up a few news stories that inspire excitement, infuriation, or curiosity.
The Importance of Climate Week NYC
In a recent Reuters op-ed, Helen Clarkson, CEO of Climate Group, explains why Climate Week NYC 2025 is essential, particularly amid political setbacks on climate action in the U.S.
Since its creation in 2009, Climate Week NYC has coincided with U.N. General Assembly. The goal, Clarkson describes, is to draw attention to the climate crisis and create space to talk about solutions. And, as she says, it works. Climate Week NYC has become a trusted platform for driving action across sectors. Clarkson cites key announcements made during past events, including California’s 2023 lawsuit against fossil fuel companies, Volvo’s diesel phase-out, and L’Oréal’s EUR€15 million disaster risk fund.
“These aren’t just bold headlines,” Clarkson writes. “They happened because Climate Week NYC brought the right people together at the right time.” Clarkson concludes that Climate Week NYC is not about asking whether to act, but about coordinating how to act—on finance, risk, clean technology, and energy demands. She writes, “We finished conversations about ‘should’ we act years ago, now we’re outlining ‘how.’”
Food Tank is honored to help ensure that food and agriculture remain central to these critical climate conversations. Food Tank has 15 Summits planned for Climate Week NYC 2025, bringing together over 300 chefs, performers, journalists, advocates, academics, business leaders, and more. From soil health to school meals, we’re proud to spotlight the solutions that make our food systems part of the path forward.
Climate Change Could Push Millions More into Poverty
A new report from the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) and the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) finds that the climate crisis could push at least 5.9 million more children and young people in Latin America and the Caribbean into poverty by 2030. The report analyses the potential effects of extreme weather events on increasing poverty levels among children, adolescents and youth, along with countries’ efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and their strategies to adapt and reduce losses and damages caused by climate change.
In what UNICEF describes as an optimistic scenario, in which governments implement rapid actions to limit GHG emissions, at least 5.9 million more children, adolescents and youth could be living in poverty by 2030. If governments implement mitigation and adaptation measures insufficiently or inefficiently, the number could be as high as 17.9 million.
Children and adolescents bear the greatest burden of climate change, according to Roberto Benes, UNICEF Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean. They are more vulnerable to extreme weather events, which also disrupt their education and families’ livelihoods. “If children and young people don’t have the resources to meet their basic needs and develop their potential, and if adequate social protection systems are not in place, the region’s inequalities will only be perpetuated,” Benes says.
The report recommends that governments strengthen the climate resilience of social services and critical infrastructure to protect children, with a particular focus on the first 1,000 days of life. It also urges child-sensitive climate policy financing, pointing out that less than 3.5 percent of all multilateral climate finance is dedicated to children—something particularly distressing as humanitarian aid declines.
Turmoil at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently announced on social media that Dr. Susan Monarez was “no longer” the Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The announcement came after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pressured Monarez to resign, and she refused. Meanwhile, four CDC senior leaders have resigned, citing political interference and a decline in scientific integrity. Kennedy has tapped one of his top advisors who has no medical or scientific training to be acting director of the agency, and recently appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to defend his tenure as Health Secretary.
Monarez, an infectious disease expert, was sworn in less than a month ago, but was at odds with Kennedy over vaccine policy, according to an administration official who is familiar with the events. Prior to HHS’s social media post, Monarez was asked to fire top agency leaders and to sign off on proposed vaccine policies, according to Richard Besser, CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and a former acting CDC director. Firing talented civil servants and rubber stamping recommendations that fly in the face of the science were the two things Monarez said she would never do on the job, Besser says.
After Monarez refused, Kennedy and one of his top aides pressured her to resign, says an HHS official granted anonymity to discuss the details. In response to HHS’s post firing Monarez, her lawyer confirmed that Monarez has not resigned and will not resign, and rejected the firing as “legally deficient.” As a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate, according to Monarez’s lawyer, Monarez can only be fired by the President.
Meanwhile, four senior CDC officials have resigned in protest. They include: Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s Chief Medical Officer and Deputy Director for Program and Science, Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, the Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, Director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID), and Dr. Jennifer Layden, Director of the office of public health data, science, technology.
NCEZID is responsible for the prevention, early detection, and control of foodborne illnesses and zoonotic diseases like Salmonella. When Dr. Monarez was fired from her position, NCEZID’s former Director Dr. Jernigan says, the agency lost the remaining leadership that would promote scientific processes and an evidence-based approach. “And for that…now is the time to go.”
Houry objected to politicization of science, vaccine misinformation, and looming budget restrictions. “Enough is enough,” Daskalakis said in his resignation letter, which describes his refusal to serve an organization whose policies do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than improve the public’s health.
Fiona Havers, a former CDC official who resigned in June, says the recent resignations are devastating for the agency. She adds that these officials acted as a “buffer between career CDC scientists and RFK Jr. and this administration’s attacks on public health.” “People will die because of this,” says another senior official at the CDC who asked to remain anonymous.
Kennedy has tapped one of his top advisors, Jim O’Neill, to be acting Director of the CDC. O’Neill will continue in his current role as Deputy Secretary at HHS while leading CDC. O’Neill previously served various roles at HHS under President George W. Bush. Since then he’s mostly run investment funds for billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
O’Neill was an early supporter of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement and a longtime vaccine critic. The Guardian reports that O’Neill voiced public support for unproven treatments that were not supported by scientific evidence, including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
Officials and policymakers expressed concerns regarding O’Neill’s lack of medical or scientific training. “You can be a great administrator but you do need to at least have a knowledge of how you’d handle an outbreak or an emerging pathogen,” Houry told NPR. According to Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), O’Neill “can’t be trusted with your health.”
Kennedy recently appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to face questioning on his vaccine policy and record as Health Secretary. The hearing was tense and combative, and some Senators called for Kennedy’s resignation.
“People are hurt by his reckless disregard for science and the truth,” says Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) expressed deep concerns regarding Kennedy’s vaccine policy, while Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) describes constituents including doctors and patients who are having trouble accessing COVID-19 booster shots because of conflicting recommendations from health agencies.
Kennedy blamed the CDC for the number of American deaths during the pandemic, and said he did not trust the data showing that vaccines saved millions of lives. Kennedy also defended the decision to fire Dr. Monarez, and wider recent layoffs at the CDC, calling them “absolutely necessary.”
Fortune: Economists Warn Produce Food Prices Could Double
Agricultural economists interviewed by Fortune are warning that produce prices in the United States could surge 50 to 100 percent by early 2026, citing labor shortages and new tariffs. It’s like seeing a tsunami coming in, and the water’s gone up two inches, describes Raymond Robertson, a labor economist at Texas A&M.
According to Gordon Hanson, an economist at Harvard Kennedy school, the impacts of tariffs and recent loss of labor are “unambiguous.” Deportations and restrictive immigration policies have sharply reduced the supply of undocumented workers, who make up the majority of U.S. agricultural labor. Robertson explains that while these workers typically earn about US$18 an hour to pick strawberries, American-born workers would require US$25 to US$30 an hour to do the same work—an unsustainable cost for most farms.
Some farms have turned to the H-2A visa program for foreign agricultural labor, but economists like Hanson say the program is too small and inefficient to fill the gap. H-2A guest workers still represent only a “small fraction” of the total farm labor force, and the program requires employers to reapply each season, according to Hanson. And the Trump-Vance administration’s arrival adds uncertainty to the future of the H-2A program.
At the same time, new tariffs on imported goods such as tomatoes, coffee, and orange juice are putting additional upward pressure on prices. Hanson warned that consumers will see a noticeable increase in prices, estimating that shoppers may face at least 50 percent increases as the effects of the tariffs ripple through the supply chain. Economists predict that the rising costs of produce and dairy will leave few healthy alternatives and drive many families to shift toward cheaper, ultra-processed foods, potentially worsening public health outcomes.
Hanson recommends expanding legal pathways for farm labor and reducing tariffs. “If we were able to create larger flows of legal farmworkers and lower tariffs, consumers are going to be better off,” he told Fortune.
Land Reclamation Threatens Indigenous Sea Communities and Coastal Ecosystems in Malaysia and Singapore
Indigenous sea communities in Malaysia and Singapore are facing growing pressure as land reclamation projects continue to degrade coastal ecosystems and deplete fish stocks, The Guardian reports.
The Orang Seletar are among the Orang Laut (which means “sea people), Indigenous communities who have historically relied on fishing. Some Orang Laut have assimilated into urban communities in Singapore, but many, including the Orang Seletar, still live in coastal villages along the Johor Strait in southern Malaysia.
These communities are witnessing severe disruptions from large-scale land reclamation efforts. Land reclamation typically involves dumping sand, cement, or rocks into the sea to create artificial landmasses for urban development. One of the most prominent examples is Forest City, one of the largest real estate projects on the planet, which was designed to house 700,000 people and employ 250,000 workers.
Only 15 percent of Forest City has been built in over 10 years of construction, and only 1 percent of the development is occupied. Already, a significant patch of fragile mangrove forest has reportedly been wiped out to make way for a golf course. And the the proposed artificial islands themselves would directly lie on swathes of species-rich seagrass beds, where fish spawn and thrives. According to Tok Batin Salim Palon, a village leader, the destruction of mangroves means that “the fish have nowhere to go.”
These ecological losses are compounded by mud stirred up by development. New landmasses and changes to shoreline contours alter wave directions and sediment transport, making waters murky and fishing even harder. “There’s no use” fishing in dirty water, says community member Bowen Bin Terawin.
Numerous similar projects across the Malay Peninsula echo the impacts of Forest City. Projects like Penang South Islands, which would reclaim over 4,500 acres of shallow fishing grounds, could bury key habitats for fish, prawns, and crabs, according to marine biologist Evelyn Teh. And these projects are often marketed as sustainable, with co-benefits for ecotourism and other commercial activities.
Some descendants of the Orang Laut in Singapore who have assimilated into urban communities are using cultural events and education to reclaim and celebrate their heritage, according to The Guardian. Meanwhile those who are still dependent on fishing are trying to find ways to adapt. Terawin now has a fish farm which allows him to produce more than traditional fishing methods provide. Others are encouraging education to prepare youth for futures beyond fishing
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Photo courtesy of chuttersnap, Unsplash
