“The year 2022 finds us with an ongoing pandemic, conflicts, a climate that won’t stop warming, rising prices and international tensions. This is affecting global food security. We need to build a sustainable world where everyone, everywhere has regular access to enough nutritious food. No One Should Be Left Behind.”
This quote is from the Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) website for World Food Day 2022, which falls today. It will be marked under the twin themes “Leave No One Behind” (Sri Lanka too has adopted this slogan) and “Eradicating Hunger”. On October 16, 1945, at the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec (Canada), the FAO, the United Nations Organisation (UN) leader in food and agriculture, was born. This date was later chosen by the UN as World Food Day.
Ours is an unequal world. Hunger still kills more people than AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) – 829 million people suffered from hunger in 2020. Sixty percent of them are women. Malnutrition accounts for 45 percent of infant deaths.
This will be an even more crucial factor in the decades ahead, as the world population is projected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050. But the extent of land available for agriculture is not going to increase and there could even be a reduction as a result of desertification and Climate Change. This is a major challenge that could threaten global food security.
Human development
Although we have made progress towards building a better world, too many people have been left behind - people who are unable to benefit from human development, innovation or economic growth.
In fact, millions of people around the world cannot afford a healthy diet, putting them at high risk of food insecurity and malnutrition. But ending hunger is not only about supply. Enough food is already produced today to feed everyone on the planet.
The problem is access and availability of nutritious food, which is increasingly impeded by multiple challenges including the Covid-19 pandemic, conflicts, Climate Change, inequality, rising prices and international tensions.
People around the world are suffering the domino effects of these challenges that know no borders.
In fact, the world is at risk of yet another year of record hunger as the global food crisis continues to drive yet more people into worsening levels of acute food insecurity, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has warned in a call for urgent action to address the root causes of today’s crisis ahead of World Food Day.
Unprecedented global food crisis
The global food crisis is a confluence of competing crises – caused by climate shocks, conflict, and economic pressures – that has increased the number of hungry people around the world in just the first eight months of 2022.
WFP scaled up food assistance targets to reach a record 153 million people in 2022, and by mid-year had already delivered assistance to 111.2 million people.
“We are facing an unprecedented global food crisis and all signs suggest we have not yet seen the worst. For the last three years hunger numbers have repeatedly hit new peaks. Let me be clear: things can and will get worse unless there is a large scale and coordinated effort to address the root causes of this crisis. We cannot have another year of record hunger,” says WFP Executive Director David Beasley.
Organic fertiliser fiasco
Humanitarian agencies are holding back famine in five countries – Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen. Sri Lanka was plunged into a food crisis by the organic fertiliser fiasco, whereby the previous Government tried to ban agrochemicals overnight and introduce organic agriculture. This policy has now been reversed, but at the cost of massively reduced crop harvests. Malnutrition in Sri Lanka has also slightly increased as many families cannot afford three square meals per day due to the current economic crisis.
Sri Lanka has ended its battle against terrorism, but too often it is conflict that drives the most vulnerable into catastrophic hunger, with communications disrupted, humanitarian access restricted, and communities displaced. The conflict in Ukraine has also disrupted global trade pushing up transport costs and lead times while leaving farmers lacking access to the agricultural inputs they need. The knock-on effect on upcoming harvests will reverberate around the world. This conflict has also created a fertiliser shortage as both Ukraine and Russia are leading producers of fertiliser and other agrochemicals.
Climate shocks are increasing in frequency and intensity, leaving those affected no time to recover between disasters. An unprecedented drought in the Horn of Africa is pushing more people into alarming levels of food insecurity, with famine now projected in Somalia. Floods have devastated homes and farmland in several countries, most recently in Pakistan.
Humanitarian support needed
According to the WFP, Governments’ ability to respond is constrained by their own economic woes – currency depreciation, inflation, debt distress – as the threat of global recession also mounts. This will see an increasing number of people unable to afford food and needing humanitarian support to meet their basic needs.
Worldwide, more than 80 percent of the extreme poor live in rural areas and many rely on agriculture and natural resources for their living. Paradoxically, some food producers such as fishermen and small-scale farmers go hungry to bed each night. They are usually the hardest hit by natural and man-made disasters and often marginalised due to their gender, ethnic origin, or status. It is a struggle for them to gain access to training, finance, innovation and technologies needed for food production and processing. I
In this context, we must move rapidly on agri-food transformation, using transition processes that consider national and local interests, with a focus on sensible production and proper nutrition, with market and trade transparency, with technical and innovation capacities, improved public policies, food education systems, greater social protection and coherence in social, economic and environmental policies.
Proactive action
We must also adapt to Climate Change by taking proactive action in the face of environmental threats and reducing emissions from agri-food systems, especially from deforestation and forest and soil degradation. From World Food Day onwards, in Rome, the headquarters of the FAO, a week will be held for the first time focusing on potential new investments in the agri-food sectors, science and innovation for food security.
This Second World Food Forum comprises the Global Youth Forum, the Science and Innovation Forum and the Hand-in-Hand Investment Forum. A series of panels will be held to raise awareness among young people, explore scientific advances in transforming agriculture, and provide a platform for stakeholders to discuss opportunities and challenges in the food sector. The World Food Forum is a youth-led movement facilitated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
Ismahane Elouafi, FAO Chief Scientist says: “We are in a crisis mode where everything is in conversion. The global population is growing, which means we need more. Climate change is making productivity harder, so not only in terms of quantity, but also in terms of quality. This conversion of growing population and climate change impact that we are seeing every day, worse and worse, makes that agriculture has to change. If we want to really produce more with less, going forward, not only today, but going forward, we need to redesign our agri-food system. The only way to do it is really through science technology, innovation.” Food security should be an integral part of national security for any country.
In another dimension of the food crisis, a combination of unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles has sent obesity rates soaring, not only in developed countries, but also low-income countries, where hunger and obesity often coexist. Over 670 million adults and 120 million girls and boys around the world are obese, and over 40 million children under 5 are overweight.
Risk factor
An unhealthy diet is the leading risk factor for deaths from Non-Communicable Diseases (NCDs), including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and certain cancers. Linked to one fifth of deaths worldwide, unhealthy eating habits are also taking a toll on national health budgets costing up to US$ 2 trillion per year. An unhealthy diet can lead to unimaginably debilitating consequences – for example, a British teenager, just 17, who consumed nothing but junk food had gone blind as he did not get nutrients vital for eyesight.
There is thus an urgent need to address the issue of balanced diets. It is essential that schoolchildren get a balanced diet. Most schools now have a program where parents are encouraged to pack healthy foods for their children. The Government has extended its school lunch program to an additional one million schoolchildren. The electronic media must play a bigger role in creating awareness on the need to have a balanced diet.
Although some meat is recommended as part of a balanced diet, there is a raging debate on meat consumption, because livestock is resource-intensive and damaging to the environment. The meat industry gobbles up an enormous amount of water, food, energy and other valuable resources and is one of the top contributors to Climate Change. In fact, it takes up to six kilos of grain to produce just 500 grams of animal flesh.
Meatless meat
In the backdrop of the increasing human population and the resources crunch, it will help the planet if more people go vegetarian. There is also a new alternative in the form of Beyond Meat et al, basically lab-grown artificial meat that tastes like the real thing. More and more restaurants are adding these items to the menu and there could be a drastic drop in meat production and consumption over the next few decades. These “meatless meat” alternatives are getting cheaper by the day to produce. The depletion of fish stocks due to overfishing and unregulated fishing is another worry as fish is the number one protein especially for coastal communities.
Moreover, one-third of food produced is lost or wasted globally, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tons per year. This is more than enough to feed the populations of entire countries. In fact, Post Harvest Losses (PHL) are a major factor that denies access to food for more people. Losses incurred during transport and storage should be minimised by using the latest technologies for preservation. This is a particularly galling problem in Sri Lanka, where hundreds of tonnes of produce can sometimes be seen rotting by the wayside. Also, households are advised to “eat (all of) what you cook” so that kitchen waste is also minimized.
Scientists are already at work to address the possible shortage of arable land in the future. Vertical or high rise agriculture has been cited as one solution while plants that can grow without soil have also gained traction recently. This science is called hydroponics - where plants are grown without soil by using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent. There are a couple of companies engaged in this form of agriculture in Sri Lanka as well.
New policies
In the context of Sri Lanka, which has an agri-based economy, it would be helpful if all political parties articulate their food and agriculture policies for at least the next decade. Modernisation of agriculture along with new technologies such as those outlined above should necessarily be part of their policies.
There is already a raging debate among political parties and also in the media on providing fertiliser to farmers but it should include wider topics such as food security, malnutrition, crop diversification, farm gate pricing and yes, organic farming. The latter is a long-term process and one cannot deny its benefits. We need a comprehensive agriculture and food policy that can take modern challenges into account. It should also not change drastically when a new Government comes to power. Some food challenges are purely local while others are global. We have to tackle both with confidence.