Between 8 and 16 October, COVERE² was in Rome for the FAO's 2026 World Food Forum and the public From Seeds to Foods exhibition at the Circus Maximus. 

This year's theme, "Innovate Today. Nourish Tomorrow.", set the tone: what we deploy, preserve and empower today decides whether tomorrow's food systems can feed a changing world. With an estimated 673 million people still facing hunger, the urgency was never in doubt. 

Here is what we took away from a packed week. 

Three Forums, One Conversation 

The Forum runs as three overlapping conferences: the Global Youth Forum, the Science and Innovation Forum and the Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum, with the Rome Water Dialogue, the Indigenous Peoples' Global Hub and World Food Day alongside. 

What delighted us right away, was the diversity of people present in the room. Delegates came from every region, and the programme deliberately put women and young people at the front: young women across the agrifood value chain, women farmers in the digital age, access to capital for women-led agribusinesses, the FAO 100 Women Heroes ceremony – just to mention a few. 

That emphasis is no coincidence. The UN General Assembly has declared 2026 the International Year of the Woman Farmer, led by FAO, to strengthen women's access to land, credit, technology, training and markets. 

Food Security Is a Systems Problem 

Food security ran through every track: clean cooking, urban food poverty, soil health, water-efficient agriculture, cascading climate risks, and the effect of the Black Sea escalation on global supply chains. 

The common thread was that hunger is rarely a production problem alone. It is a question of water governance, infrastructure, market access, resilience to shocks, and whether the evidence reaching decision-makers is good enough. One session title put it bluntly: "Drowning in Data, Starving for Evidence-informed Decisions." 

Youth Are Not the Future of Agriculture. They Are Its Present. 

The Global Youth Forum opened with 35 new National Youth Chapters, and the youth agenda did not "stay in its own lane". Young entrepreneurs pitched in the Startup Innovation Awards, young scientists competed in the Transformative Research Challenge, and joint sessions with the investment track asked: "How to reboot agrifood investment for a new generation?" 

Generational renewal was a recurring worry. In Europe and Central Asia it was called "the forgotten investment": farming populations are ageing, and without land, finance and digital skills, young people will not replace them. The Forum's answer was to treat youth as innovators, not passive beneficiaries. 

Directing Capital to Where Impact Is Highest 

The Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum opened with 38 countries and five regional initiatives presenting a record USD 20.16 billion in proposed agrifood investments, up from USD 17.3 billion in 2025, with a potential reach of 117.8 million people. 

The model is instructive for any company thinking about impact. FAO combines geospatial, climate, soil, infrastructure, market and poverty data to identify where investment delivers the most. Every case carries a pitch deck with expected returns and sustainability indicators. Governments set priorities and provide enabling ecosystems, academia supplies the evidence, multilateral institutions connect and lift up the right stakeholders, development banks absorb early losses, private investors bring speed and scale. 

A joint investment-and-science session, "Artificial Intelligence: Bridging the investment gap," extended the logic: AI can screen opportunities, model risk and track outcomes, provided the underlying data is reliable. Good capital allocation starts with good, comparable data. 

What This Means for Companies 

That logic applies to a European food manufacturer or retailer as much as to a intergovernmental organization in Rome. Investors, customers and regulators are asking the same question: where does your activity create real impact, and can you prove it? 

This is where sustainability reporting stops being a compliance exercise and becomes strategy. A company that measures emissions, water use, supply-chain risk and social impact in a structured way can direct its own investment the way Hand-in-Hand does: towards what returns most for the business and the people it depends on. 

At COVERE² we help companies get there. Our platform structures ESG data against international frameworks, keeps evidence traceable and audit-ready, and turns reporting into a decision-support tool rather than an annual chore, so that investors, buyers and regulators can see the impact behind the numbers is real. 

Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow. Measuring what matters is where it starts.