A meal a day can change the world

Ville Skinnari, the Finnish minister for development cooperation and foreign trade, speaks with a group of foreign press at the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Helsinki on Thursday. [ESTHER CHUNG]

When Ville Skinnari, the Finnish minister for development cooperation and foreign trade, says that the Finns’ school meal program is part of their social DNA, he means it.  
 
The initiative, which feeds all of Finland’s nearly 850,000 students from pre-primary to upper secondary school, was born in the ashes of world war only two generations ago.
 
“After the war, Finland was resettling thousands of internally displaced people and orphans, like my grandparents from Vyborg,” said Skinnari, speaking with a group of foreign press at the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Helsinki on Thursday.
 
Vyborg, a Finnish medieval town, was taken by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. Finland evacuated its residents and resettled them in other parts of the country.
 
Because almost all Finns have a story to tell when it comes to school meal memories, they couldn’t just stand by and watch when the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered schools across the world and left 370 million school children without access to the one meal a day they could rely on, said Skinnari.

A plate of school meal at the Viikki Teacher Training School in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday. [ESTHER CHUNG]

 
Last November, the country launched the School Meals Coalition, with France and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to guarantee every boy and girl in the world at least one nutritious meal a day by 2030. Skinnari has been appointed the School Meals Champion by WFP.  
 
“I know it sounds ambitious, but we believe it is do-able,” said Skinnari. “At the end of the day, it’s a matter of how much the school system is valued at the political level in each and every country.”
 
In the lead up to the ministerial meeting of the School Meals Coalition in Helsinki this week, reporters from nine countries – Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Korea, Mexico, Nepal, Philippines and South Africa – sat down with Skinnari to hear more about Finland’s investment in its students’ wellbeing and how that might change the fate of hundreds of millions of children facing acute hunger today.
 
The following are edited excerpts of the conversation, re-arranged in a question-and-answer format.
 

Students during lunch at the Viikki Teacher Training School in Helsinki, Finland, on Wednesday. [ESTHER CHUNG]

BY ESTHER CHUNG [chung.juhee@joongang.co.kr]