| Crucial school-meal programs feed some 418 million children and have created about 4 million direct jobs around the world. They also require huge amounts of food and crops to feed growing stomachs. Now, the programs are being used to help develop a burgeoning part of the agriculture industry — making farming more sustainable and resilient to climate change. The Rockefeller Foundation is putting up $100 million to provide 100 million children in the US and elsewhere with more nutritious meals, using produce sourced locally and grown using regenerative methods. The five-year effort builds on initial work in Brazil and Kenya and will span more than a dozen countries, it said Thursday. Among several initiatives, the foundation will work to boost consumption of micronutrient-rich, locally-sourced, indigenous and more resilient crops like millet, teff, and sorghum in schools. It will also work with investors and other philanthropies to provide upfront capital for regenerative farming, which involves making crops and soil more resilient to weather shocks, while helping protect soil, water and biodiversity. This is where financing is still limited. Despite being hailed as a climate solution for farming and drawing interest from some major corporations, regenerative agriculture hasn't yet attracted enough finance to gain widespread traction. Global data is hard to come by, but BloombergNEF estimates that about 1% of US arable land is committed to regenerative farming. Funding school-meal programs that source such produce is one way to help encourage investment in the area. The program "is not looking at just support to farmers on the transition, nor is it just looking on how do we get to universal school feeding," Sara Farley, the Rockefeller Foundation's vice president for the global food portfolio, said in an interview in New York last week. "It's looking at building markets, and the market really is the glue between supply and demand." The announcement came as the world's biggest philanthropies, UN agencies and governments gathered in Paris this week to mobilize funding for nutrition. Feeding kids is more pressing than ever. Even before US President Donald Trump unleashed cuts to overseas development and aid, less than 1% of public aid was devoted to nutrition. More than $27 billion was mobilized at the Paris summit to combat food insecurity, French President Emmanuel Macron said in a post on X. Poor nutrition hurts a child's mental and physical capabilities later in life, with grave economic consequences. The World Bank estimates that some $3 trillion in productivity is already lost each year globally due to malnutrition, and expects to spend at least $5 billion in nutrition-related activities in the next five years. "Investing in nutrition is smart economics, with every dollar spent generating exponential returns: healthier populations, stronger workforces, and sustained economic growth," said Axel van Trotsenburg, senior managing director at the World Bank. Food trade war latest: - Trump is set to unveil so-called reciprocal levies on April 2, which could reshape major trading partnerships in a range of sectors.
- Brazil is pressing Mexico to allow pork exports from more meat plants as Latin America's biggest economy seeks to win new markets by taking advantage of Trump's trade wars.
- Bloomberg's Tariff Tracker follows all the twists and turns of global trade wars.
—Agnieszka de Sousa in London | 
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