One-third of boys in the developing world don’t face the risk of marriage and pregnancy before age 18. There are no laws preventing men from owning land or property. Men don’t bear the brunt of increasingly frequent and severe disasters. And men don’t hold fewer than 25 percent of parliamentary seats worldwide.

Viewed from afar, the two-mile-long Mosul Dam is an impressive sight on the flat, sunbaked northern plains.

Policymakers typically address issues like climate, food security, development, and reproductive health separately. But that is not how those issues are experienced by women in developing countries. “At the ground level, these issues overlap 100 percent,” said Dr. Yetnayet Asfaw of EngenderHealth during a recent dialogue on global health and development held at the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings’ Civil Society Policy Forum.

China faces a dilemma. It is home to 20 percent of the world’s population but only seven percent of the world’s water resources and nine percent of the world’s arable land. At the same time, a rising middle class is demanding more food. Over the last 30 years, China’s meat demand has quadrupled.

From Ukraine and the Middle East to sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, the world is engulfed in a series of significant international crises. But despite such urgent issues, it would be a grave mistake to forget about the structural foreign policy challenges – such as access to water – that could become the crises of the future.

“Valuing women, paying greater attention to women’s rights – that’s the solution to our population growth issues and, I would argue, it’s also the solution to our food security challenges,” said Suzanne Petroni at the Thought for Food Summit in Berlin last year.