In next 25 years, agriculture will meet huge pressure in our plant. With rapid increasing of global population, which may reach 9 billion in 2050, challenges show up: land shortage, clean water access, climate change, energy contention and survival threat. To support this exaggerated population, food production need to rise from 8.4 billion currently to 13.5 billion tons per year.
On 25th September 2015, a new global goals for the next 15 years is addressed by UN’s 193 Member States in New York called “Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” which includes 17 sustainable goals (SDGs), 169 targets and 230 indicators.
Food and agriculture are completely engaged in all goals and targets. Goal one: end poverty, goal two: end hunger, goal fourteen: oceans and marine resources and goal fifteen: ecosystem explain intensive relationship with food and agriculture.
Food and Agriculture Organization play a very important role in achieving process. Food security is recognized as key issue linked to future challenges to build sustainable world. FAO pointed fourteen specific area to contribute for sustainable goals.
- Food security and the right to food
Over 842 million people (2015) suffered from hunger in their daily life. Like poverty, food insecurity continually impacts both rural and urban regions. In rural area, poor farmers and agricultural workers do not have access to food. Citizens although have relatively sufficient food apply, reprocessing and disease control threat healthy food. Food security is related to economic growth, decent employment, social protection, health and natural resources management. Moreover, gender inequality opposes sustainable development including food security. First challenge comes from environment. With development of global business, food system has changed. Because of land degradation, extreme weather, urbanization and global market issues, food productivity and price went through fluctuation. FAO suggested that explicit political commitments need to be pushed. They should understand common underlying causes with data and information. Besides, appropriate governance mechanisms need to be established at reginal and country levels. Department in different level, projects and programs should feed demands with cooperation that ensure relevance and purposeful action towards the eradication of hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition. Accountability mechanism and monitoring capacities need to be strengthened in all area of sectors.
- Nutrition
Malnutrition including undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, obesity and diet impact both individual’s health and national economy particular in developing countries. For people, malnutrition affects body growth and cognitive development of baby and young children, undermining the capacities and capabilities of individuals and communities. FAO estimated that 12% of the world population go through hungry with undernourishment. 26% children in the world approximately under five years old are stunted. Meanwhile, more than 1.4 million people are overweight. The cost of malnutrition put emphasis on importance for seeking solution that loss of productivity and direct health care spending can account for as much as five percent of the global gross domestic product. Nutrition is a complicated context that access to safe, diverse, nutritious food, lack of access to clean water, poor sanitation and health care participate in. Since economy and technology have changed our daily life, food production and consumption changed a lot. In developing countries, some people living in higher standard are suffering from obesity under over consumption while others are facing problem of undernutrition. That is a problem of food supply and should not happen. This need integrated action through sectors to solve challenge. Agriculture and health department should enhance nutrition of food. FAO pointed that producing food, generating income and supporting livelihoods is fundamental is the role of nutrition. To effectively increase nutrition, agriculture programs and policies have to set up index of nutrition and supervision department at the mean time need to check how much these indexes approached. In global view, international standard should be promoted. Countries follow and ensure food supply and quality. This will achieve only be realized if strategies are supported by investment plans and social activities connected with promoting diversification of livelihoods and diet. In the past few years, there has been far more concerns paid to the multiple burdens of malnutrition, with national and international initiatives rising to the challenge. The launch of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition can also refocus attention on opportunities to maximize the contribution of agriculture and food systems to improve nutrition.
- Poverty eradication
People living less than USD 1.25 per day are defined as extreme poverty. Nowadays about 1.2 billion people in developing countries are experiencing extreme poverty. Moderate poverty, however is deducing in a very low pace. And more than 75% of the extreme and moderate poverty in rural area relies on agriculture. There are many issues coming with poverty. Children are forced to go into labor market which is illegal. Kids work in hard conditions with poor salary and is harmful for their health. Poverty reduction has been processed around the world. However, in order to enhance economic growth, government increases production with high-tech and modern facilities. Local producers don’t failed to access improved construction. Besides, extreme weather and climate change heavily impact environment plants grow and demand of stocks aggravates land degradation. To shift current situation, policy priorities need to change. The major of the rural poor are small-scale farmers which contribute most of productivity of food in the whole. Helping them access sustainable resources and advanced technology to increase production. Reducing poverty requires ecological and resource sustainability. Increased food production will exacerbate land degradation, greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss unless production methods and consumption patterns become more sustainable. So farmers need affordable access to technologies. Another method is to distribute employment into board area. It could reduce waste of labor force as well as ascend local economy. About market, facilities and road construction should follow the step of production. Investment in other part related to local residents such as education, health care and social welfare are essential. It is a long time running program that young people would learn skills to work in non-agriculture areas.
- Resilience
The recurrence of disasters and crises undermines nations’ efforts to eradicate hunger and malnutrition and to achieve sustainable development. Over the past 12 years, disasters have caused an estimated USD 1.3 trillion in damages, causing dead of 1.1 million people and affecting another 2.7 billion. In 2012 alone, disasters caused economic losses at USD 138 billion, continuing the recent upward tendency and marking the first time that annual economic losses have exceeded USD 100 billion in three years. Disasters and crises threaten the production of food at local, national and global levels. Shocks can strike suddenly like a flash flood or a drought. Crises can occur as a single emergency, one can trigger another, or multiple events can combine and impact at same time with magnified effects. As an example, three years of repeated floods (2010 to 2012) have inflicted serious damage on Pakistan’s economy, halving its potential growth. Pakistan lost a total of USD 16 billion to the floods in these three years, with estimated damages in agriculture amounting to USD 2 billion in flood damages on over 1 million acres of standing crops. The Hyogo Framework Action (HFA) provided an approach to reduce vulnerabilities and risk to hazards. Over 12years, this process has been monitored but was various in different countries. The process to develop a successor arrangement to the HFA is already underway. To address declining risks of disasters, we need to promote relationship between interventions in different scales. Challenges of climate change and disaster risk reduction should be solved in an integrated way through policies and strategies.
- Social protection
FAO pointed that today only a fifth of the world population could get social protection. Social security is regarded as a basic content of social protection. But in rural regions, it is not enough. Labor market informality limits the potential coverage of contributory. Without access to instruments for risk-mitigation or risk-sharing, poor rural families are more likely to sell off their assets, shift to less risky, but lower yielding crops, or take their children out of school to work, which is likely to weaken future livelihood prospects. The main challenge of government, illustrated by FAO, is to extend social protection to the most deprived and vulnerable people, especially in rural area and urban informal sector. And next we will overcome often fragmented delivery of social protection in isolation of other economic policies. To solves, FAO suggests that we should help household to overcome dietary energy undernourishment by improving their access to food with particular strong impacts. Increasing local economy to increase employment to get positive feedbacks. All in all, different sectors of the government need to work together to deliver social protection successfully.
- Climate change
Agriculture, forestry and fisheries have many challenges today. Agricultural production will have to increase globally by an estimated 60 percent by 2050, and to double in developing countries, to meet projected expanding demands for food and feed from a growing and changing world population. Many current crops are already under stress through degradation of land and water resources and loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services resulting from unsustainable practices. These challenges will be exacerbated an expected increase in extreme weather events. Without properly addressing these issues, we will not succeed in ensuring world food security, sustainable and equitable development and poverty eradication. Climate change is expected to impact the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sectors in many different ways. While rising temperatures and the effects of CO2 fertilization may benefit production in some regions, in the short term the overall consequences to yields are expected to be adverse. Climate change impact four part of food security: food availability, food accessibility, the stability of food supply, and the ability of consumers to adequately utilize food including food safety and nutrition. It need a variety of approaches. Firstly, we should sustainably increasing agricultural productivity and incomes. Secondly, adapting and building resilience to climate change and last is reducing and removing greenhouse gas emissions. International governance is also curial in addressing action in sectors related to designing.
- Ecosystem services, biodiversity, genetic resources
Biodiversity is key to food security and nutrition. Its genetic component provides the variation needed to increase food production, enhance its quality and adapt it to ever-changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. Many economic sectors depend on biodiversity and ecosystem services, including agriculture, fisheries, forestry, health, nutrition, energy and tourism. The expected growth of the human population, and the consequent need for additional food, feed and fiber, will put stronger pressure on the environment. Presently, humans use only a fraction of the existing biodiversity for food security and nutrition. Using such a small number of species, often with a narrow genetic base, increases the vulnerability of agriculture systems and puts food security and nutrition at increasing risk. Global initiatives has been established addressing the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
In conclusion, FAO has promoted a lot to approach SDGs. There are totally 14 aspects pointed by FAO and here I just show some of them. It is a comprehensive project connected with SDGs. However, we could see that most of suggestions are provided to government level which is far away from individuals.And supervision mechanism in action need to be refined. There is still a long process to achieve goals.