Every August 12, International Youth Day recognizes the contributions of young people to sustainable development. The 2026 theme, “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,” reflects the different conditions young people face and the shared goals that connect their efforts.

This year’s theme is especially relevant to global food systems, which shape both the livelihoods and well-being of young people around the world. Globally, 44% of working youth were employed in agrifood systems in 202.  At the same time, food insecurity among young people increased from 16.7% in 2014–2016 to 24.4% in 2021–2023. These figures show how closely young people’s futures are tied to the challenges and opportunities within food systems.

Young people are playing an increasingly active role in responding to these challenges and shaping the future of food systems. Across different regions and circumstances, they are developing solutions that reflect the needs of their own communities, from agriculture and school food to public policy, food waste, and the commercial environments that influence what people eat. The five examples below show how young people are turning local ideas into action and contributing to broader food-system change.

Bringing Precision Agriculture to Farmers — Benin

Food insecurity continues to affect communities across the West African nation of Benin, particularly during the lean season when access to food becomes more difficult. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that more than 201,000 people will face acute food insecurity between June and August 2026. These pressures increase the need for practical agricultural innovations that can help farmers improve productivity, use resources more efficiently, and strengthen resilience against disturbances.

Young agricultural researcher Marietta Gonroudobou founded Agro Hikari to connect scientific knowledge with farmers. The platform translates agronomic research into practical guidance and has expanded into digital agriculture. Gonroudobou has also developed a drone-based spraying solution designed to make agricultural input use more precise.

In 2026, the World Food Prize Foundation named Gonroudobou a Top Agri-food Pioneer. Agro Hikari also won the Benin edition of the Prix Pierre Castel and received €25,000 plus a year of mentorship. The project remains an emerging model, and this support provides an opportunity to test its precision-agriculture services at a larger scale.

Rethinking the Waste That Comes With School Lunch — United States

Disposable food service items contribute to a large stream of plastic waste in the United States, including the polystyrene trays still used in many school cafeterias. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the country generated about 80,000 tons of polystyrene containers in 2018, and less than 5,000 tons were recycled. In Houston, three fourth-graders brought attention to this issue by questioning the use of disposable polystyrene trays in their school cafeterias.

In 2025, River Oaks Elementary students Celine David, Maddie Woods, and Dora Cabarcas researched alternatives to polystyrene lunch trays. They gathered more than 250 signatures on an online petition and presented their findings to Houston Independent School District leaders. Their efforts helped prompt HISD to launch a pilot program testing alternative trays at River Oaks Elementary and Hogg Middle School.

Evidence from other school systems suggests that reusable serviceware can substantially reduce cafeteria waste. A 2026 study of California elementary schools found that schools using reusable trays and other serviceware reduced packaging and serviceware waste by about 5 kilograms less packaging and serviceware waste per day than schools that continued using disposable items. The HISD pilot will help the district assess how these alternatives perform in practice and whether they can be expanded more widely. The students’ campaign shows how young people can use research and community engagement to influence decisions within their own schools and communities.

Turning Youth Innovation Into Food-System Solutions — Indonesia

Indonesia faces a generational challenge in agriculture. Almost 80 percent of the country’s farmers are age 40 or older, while young people ages 15 to 29 account for about half of its unemployed population. Together, these trends highlight an opportunity to connect youth employment and entrepreneurship with the future of agriculture.

The 2025 Youth Innovation Challenge received more than 230 proposals and selected 18 finalists for mentorship and training. Winning projects included vertical farming that reuses kitchen waste, artificial intelligence for fruit-fly control, and circular systems that convert food scraps into farm inputs. Ten innovators shared Rp84 million in awards and presented their ideas to government representatives.

The program gave young people an opportunity to develop and refine their ideas while connecting with institutions that could support implementation. Initiatives like this can provide early support for locally  developed solutions, helping young innovators test what works and identify approaches with the potential to grow.

Challenging the Food Advertising Environment — United Kingdom

The food system extends beyond how food is grown and produced to the environments that influence what people see, choose, and buy. A 2025 University of Liverpool study found that 44 percent of surveyed outdoor advertisements promoted food or drinks, with one in four promoting unhealthy products. These advertisements appeared six times more often per kilometer in the most deprived areas studied.

Youth activists with Bite Back responded through the 2025 Commercial Break campaign. They placed youth-designed messages across 365 advertising spaces in London and called for stronger limits on unhealthy food marketing. Organizers estimated that the intervention prevented about 14.8 million people from being exposed to the advertisements that would otherwise have occupied those spaces.

UK-wide restrictions on less healthy food advertising on television before 9 p.m. and in paid online advertising took effect on January 5, 2026. However, the national rules do not cover billboards or other outdoor advertising, which remains a focus of Bite Back’s advocacy. The campaign demonstrates how young people can use evidence and advocacy to engage companies and policymakers around the food environments that shape consumption.

Bringing Youth Ideas Into Food Policy — Ecuador

Food loss and waste pose both environmental and food-security pressures in Ecuador. A 2025 report by the Harvard Law School Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Global FoodBanking Network estimates that more than 900,000 tons of food are lost or wasted each year. The report  also found that 37 percent of the population experienced moderate or severe food insecurity between 2020 and 2022.

The World Food Forum Ecuador Youth Chapter has brought young people into national discussions about this issue. In October 2025, the chapter convened youth with government institutions, food banks, and civil-society organizations. The meeting helped gather evidence and advanced a coordinated proposal to reform Ecuador’s food loss and waste law.

In 2026, the chapter continued developing youth skills through training in project management, resource mobilization, and public policy. More than 30 young leaders from eight provinces participated in a May workshop that also strengthened connections among youth networks. Its work shows how youth groups can bring local concerns into formal policy discussions.

Cultivating Change

Global food challenges are complex, and they often result from deep, underlying, and interrelated factors that no single solution can address. Effective responses need to reflect the social, environmental, and economic conditions of each place. Meaningful progress therefore depends on understanding how a problem operates locally and developing solutions that respond to its underlying drivers.

The youth-led efforts featured here show how place-based action can create spaces for innovation. Young people are testing technologies, mobilizing communities, and engaging institutions around problems they experience locally. These experiments can reveal practices that work under specific conditions. Governments, companies, and nonprofits can then evaluate those lessons and adapt promising approaches elsewhere.

Youth-led ideas can have greater impact when young people have sustained support to develop and expand them. Mentorship builds technical and organizational capacity, financing provides the time and resources needed to strengthen promising initiatives, and partnerships with governments, civil society, businesses, and other institutions can create pathways for wider adoption. FAO research similarly highlights investment, meaningful participation in decision-making, access to skills and resources, and improved financing as key conditions for youth engagement in agrifood-system transformation.

International Youth Day is an opportunity to celebrate young people’s contributions while recognizing what they need to turn ideas to lasting change. It’s also an opportunity to turn that creativity into action. Young people can support EARTHDAY.ORG’s Canopy Tree Project, explore our Climate Education campaign, or join The Great Global Cleanup. Each offers a way to take action and mobilize others. This International Youth Day, find a challenge in your community and help cultivate a solution.

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A strong El Niño could make growing food harder in many parts of the world this year. This natural climate pattern brings warmer surface waters to the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean, which in turn releases more heat into the atmosphere and shifts rainfall, wind, and storm patterns. El Niño can worsen heat and drought in some places and raise the risk of severe flooding in others. These changes could add more pressure to a global food system already strained by climate change, conflict, fuel costs, and fertilizer shortages.

This year’s El Niño could arrive at a difficult time. The World Meteorological Organization is predicting an 80% chance of an El Niño event beginning before August, rising to 90% by November. Forecasts also suggest that this El Niño could be moderate to strong, adding to what is already likely to be a year of record heat following the 11 warmest years on record. This extra heat can dry soils faster, increase water stress, and make droughts more damaging for crops and livestock.

The global food system, in particular, is also facing political and economic pressure. The ongoing U.S.–Iran conflict has raised concerns about the availability and price of fuel, fertilizer, shipping, and food. 

When fuel and fertilizer become more expensive or harder to get, farmers may face difficult choices. Some farmers may grow crops on less land to save money. Others may cut back on fertilizer, even if it lowers crop yields. Farmers may also have a harder time storing, moving, or selling their products.

When El Niño Reaches the Dinner Table 

El Niño changes where rain falls. Wetter conditions often affect parts of the southern United States, southern South America, East Africa, and Central Asia. At the same time, hotter and drier weather can affect Central America, northern South America, the Caribbean, Australia, and parts of South and Southeast Asia.

These changes can seriously impact agriculture. Persistent drought leads to reduced crop yields, delayed planting, shrinking pasturelands, and limited irrigation water. The intense heat stress linked to El Niño may also damage crops during key growth stages and lower milk, meat, and egg production from livestock.

Rain-fed farms are especially at risk. They rely on seasonal rainfall rather than irrigation, so shifts in timing or intensity can quickly leave crops without enough water. When rains weaken, arrive too late, or stop too soon, farmers can lose part or all of their harvest.

More rain can create problems, too. Heavy rainfall does not always mean farms have more usable water, especially when rain falls in short, intense bursts. Much of it can run off the land rather than soak into the soil, and flooding often washes away fertile soil, damages crops, and even overwhelms drainage and irrigation systems.

El Niño can also push food prices higher. When harvests fail in a major farming region, the shock may move through global markets and raise prices in other countries. A 2023 European Central Bank analysis estimated that a strong El Niño could increase global food commodity prices by up to 9%. Soybeans, corn, and rice, which are used across the food system in animal feed, cooking oil, and processed food, are at the greatest risk for cost increases. 

This risk could worsen in 2026 due to the conflict in the Middle East. In the two months after the war began, the World Bank reported that global food prices rose 5%, while grain prices rose 3%. These rising costs can make basic foods even more expensive, especially for households that already spend a large share of their income on food.

For low-income families, even small increases in food prices can be serious. Higher costs may force some households to buy less nutritious food. The impacts can continue even after El Niño ends. Damaged roads, irrigation systems, and storage facilities can affect future planting seasons. Farmers who lose income during one season may have fewer resources to buy seeds, fertilizer, labor, or equipment for the next season.

Making Food Systems More Resilient

A strong El Niño could place new pressure on a food system that is already under stress, reducing harvests, raising food prices, damaging infrastructure, and deepening hunger in vulnerable communities. This potential crisis makes the shift to sustainable and resilient food production even more urgent.

Regenerative agriculture can help farmers build resilience to El Niño by managing food production to restore soil health, support biodiversity, and strengthen ecosystems. One approach is reduced or zero tillage, which limits soil disturbance and helps the ground keep its structure, organic matter, and moisture. Farmers may also use cover crops to protect bare soil from erosion, heat, and water loss between growing seasons. Meanwhile, employing crop rotation helps maintain soil nutrients by rotating what is planted in a field over time, rather than growing the same crop repeatedly. Agroforestry can also be employed to grow trees alongside crops or pasture, where they provide shade, help retain water, and support biodiversity.  

Together, these regenerative practices can help farms better withstand shifting weather patterns, drought, and heavy rain. During dry periods, healthier soil can hold more moisture. Meanwhile, during heavy rainfall, the same soil can absorb more water, reducing erosion. Farmers planting a diverse variety of crops may also lower the risk of total loss when one crop fails.

Regenerative agriculture can also reduce farmers’ dependence on expensive synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. With fewer products to buy, farms become less exposed to rising prices or unstable supply chains.

Farmers cannot adopt regenerative practices alone. They need funding, training, secure land rights, and access to markers to make these changes possible and lasting. Resources such as early warning systems, digital tools, and farmer support programs can also help them prepare for future El Niño events.

The Path Forward

El Niño is a recurring climate pattern, but food crises do not have to be recurring outcomes.

As the next El Niño approaches, the need for more sustainable food production is becoming more urgent. Building healthier soils, mitigating climate change, supporting farmers, and investing in resilient food systems can help communities prepare for the next major shock.

To learn more about how regenerative agriculture can help build more resilient food systems, explore EARTHDAY.ORG’s Regenerative Agriculture campaign.

This article is available for republishing on your website, newsletter, magazine, newspaper, or blog. The accompanying imagery is cleared for use with attribution. Please ensure that the author’s name and their affiliation with EARTHDAY.ORG are credited. Kindly inform us if you republish so we can acknowledge, tag, or repost your content. You may notify us via email at woods@earthday.org. Want more articles? Follow us on substack.

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