Heather, you know if you had asked me this, probably, three years ago, I would have said I had 0% confidence. The reason I may be a little more confident right now is that in the last five, four or three years, if you turned on the television, it was nothing but Trump, Trump, Trump, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit, COVID, COVID, COVID. You couldn't get coverage on any other issue. For the first time, I think we are breaking through in the media about this food crisis.
I am a little hopeful, because I'm seeing world leaders respond now, recognizing that food security is a very serious problem we are facing around the world. It is not like next week you could just say, “I'm short of food. How about producing more?”. You have to plan it. You have to water it. You have to grow it. You have to harvest it. This is not a short-term, one-month thing.
The response that I have been seeing so far has been remarkable, particularly from the G7, as to agricultural production and offsets to the diminishing return we may see inside Ukraine. However, I'm gravely concerned about the amount of money that is going to be necessary to respond in the short term for those who are not getting the food they need. I'm gravely concerned about that, and that's why I've been calling on the world's mega-billionaires to step up at a time like this. They should step up. They made, on average, a $5.2 billion increase per day during COVID. There is no way they can't give us one or two days' worth of their net worth increase. I'm continuing to jump up and down on that.
Governments are tapped out. We have to hope that the agricultural community can respond, with from leadership from the G7 and others, but at the same time, we need to put pressure on the world's richest of the rich to give at a time like this, because the world is truly in crisis.