More than 1,000 people from over 60 countries gathered in Des Moines, Iowa, to hear a blunt message about hunger: “Food that makes people sick does not feed them.” QU Dongyu, Director-General of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), delivered it at the opening of the 2026 World Food Prize ceremony, where Dutch scientist Huub Lelieveld was honored for a career focused on making food safer.
The point reaches beyond how much food farms produce. People also need to know that what they eat will not make them ill, and that safe food can reach those who need it. QU said food made unsafe by contamination causes illness affecting 866 million people. In low- and middle-income countries alone, the resulting lost work and medical costs are estimated at $110 billion a year.
Lelieveld received the prize for more than six decades of research, advocacy and work to build food safety institutions. His efforts contributed to standards that are aligned across countries, helping make food safety rules more consistent. QU described Lelieveld’s guiding belief as the idea that access to safe food is a universal right.
The annual award honors Norman Borlaug, whose work on higher-yielding wheat varieties helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of hunger. This year’s gathering included participants from more than 600 organizations, four agriculture ministers and past World Food Prize recipients. The ceremony formed part of the Borlaug International Dialogue, a meeting focused on the future of food and farming.
In a speech titled “What Will It Take to Feed the Future?”, QU set out three connected goals: produce enough food for a growing population while using fewer inputs and protecting the environment; make sure food is safe and nutritious; and get it to the people who need it most. He linked these aims to FAO’s 2022–2031 strategy, known as the Four Betters: better production, better nutrition, a better environment and a better life, leaving no one behind.
Food safety, QU said, is also tied to trade and farmers’ incomes. Shared standards can help prevent illness while lowering the costs of trade. Contamination can cross borders: he cited aflatoxin, a harmful substance that affected maize across the American Midwest after a 2012 drought. It also threatens health and incomes in much of Africa and South Asia, and can keep farmers from selling into markets that pay more.
QU pointed to bodies such as the Codex Alimentarius Commission and the International Plant Protection Convention, both hosted at FAO, as important parts of international food safety work. FAO also supports developing countries as they put standards into practice, especially nations that depend on imported food. A new FAO partnership on animal diseases aims to protect producers through shared monitoring, prevention measures and rapid response.
The work ahead is to make food systems more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable, while ensuring safe food reaches everyone. As QU put it at a dinner honoring World Food Prize winners, “Safe food is the foundation of food security.”