FEEDING THE WORLD
From a local farm to United Nations
Growing up on a Claresholmarea farm, Robert Opp received an early education in the virtues of producing such everyday staples as wheat, barley, canola and oats.
“Food is so closely associated with life and the life spirit,” says the 45-year-old, the fourth generation of a southern Alberta farm family. “I was very tempted to stay and take over the family farm.”
Like so many other Prairie farm kids, Opp first went to university, which put him on a much different path — in fact, his career has taken him pretty well over the world for the better part of two decades.
Food, though, has remained his passion — just not in the way he envisioned it all those years ago.
Opp is the director of innovation and change management for the United Nations’ World Food Program or WFP, the largest food assistance organization in the world.
With a budget of around $6 billion a year, the WFP reaches out to more than 80 million of the world’s hungry each year, in approximately 80 countries around the globe. The program relies on funding from governments, corporations, foundations and individuals to help the program in its goal of “Zero Hunger by 2030.”
When it comes to generosity, says Opp, his home country more than punches above its weight. “Canada is the fifth largest donor,” says Opp, speaking to the Herald on Friday from Ottawa, where he is attending an international conference on the future of food.
“The people we serve really owe a debt of gratitude to Canadians.”
Just how Opp came to be such a major player in the world’s largest food program is a mix of his learnings as a farm kid and later, transformative life experiences.
The spirit and values of a small community, says the youngest of Don and Frankie’s two sons, instilled in him early a “sense of neighbourliness.” His older brother, James Opp, is a professor of Canadian history at Carleton University in Ottawa.
“I wanted to make sure that whatever I pursued in life, it had a positive impact on people,” he says. “My upbringing instilled in me a basic sense of justice.”
While pursuing a bachelor of arts degree at the University of Lethbridge, Opp did a semester abroad, in the West African country of Ghana. “That opened my eyes to the world of international issues,” he says, “seeing the incredibly difficult situation poor people find themselves in — it was fascinating, eye-opening and alarming.”
He joined the WFP in 1999, as part of a junior professional office program, first working in the wartorn African country of Angola, where he met his wife Isabelle. “There was deprivation, but also abundance,” Opp, who also has a masters degree in international affairs from Carleton University, of that time.
Today, Opp is based out of the WFP’s headquarters in Rome, Italy. In his current role as director of innovation and change management, he oversees a team of “about 90 per cent millennials” who are using state-of-the-art technologies to tackle the age-old program of hunger.
The new strategies include everything from using mobile phones to gather data from inaccessible areas via SMS and employing artificial intelligence to help speed up the reading of drone and satellite imagery; it is also currently testing block-chain technology to improve its cash transfer program, which provides people with money to purchase their own foods.
Opp highlights another new initiative, that of the fundraising app Sharethemeal (sharethemeal. org). “It’s a crowdfunding app, where everyone can do a little bit,” he says of the app, which has already seen $9 million in donations and is available for download. “You can give a donation that covers the cost of a meal for one person for one day, one week, one month.”
With nearly 800 million human beings across the globe currently suffering from hunger due to everything from conflict and disasters to migration-related crises, Opp and his colleagues at the WFP have a monumental challenge.
Yet the former southern Alberta farm boy, a father of two young girls, remains buoyantly optimistic. “In 1990, there were more than a billion people facing hunger,” he says. “But we have to accelerate it to reach our goal by 2030, and all of us can do our part.”