In advance of the Rio +20 Earth Summit, at which world leaders will meet to discuss methods of tackling poverty and climate change, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has released its vision for future development. The FAO today said that the solutions to achieving world food security lie in improving resource distribution, reducing waste and consumption and adopting sustainable farming techniques, rather than focusing exclusively on increasing yields.  

The organisation has released a new report Towards the future we want: end hunger and make the transition to sustainable agricultural and food systems, in which it argues that improving access to healthy, sustainable food and knowledge sharing is imperative around the world to address current unsustainable consumption patterns and eradicate chronic hunger. On the back of its report, the FAO is urging governments to ensure its goals are met.

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 FAO representatives today said, outlining the organisation’s position ahead of next month’s talks, that “Sustainable development cannot be realized unless hunger and malnutrition are eradicated.” FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva commented, "We cannot call development sustainable while this situation persists, while nearly one out of every seven men, women and children are left behind, victims of undernourishment,"

He continued, "The quest for food security can be the common thread that links the different challenges we face and helps build a sustainable future. At the Rio Summit we have the golden opportunity to explore the convergence between the agendas of food security and sustainability to ensure that happens."

The barriers to food security

Following on from the UK government’s Environmental Audit Committee report on ‘sustainable food’ and food security debate which took place in the House of Lords earlier this month, both of which resulted in calls for a more joined up approach to food, health and the environment, the FAO report demands a more cohesive approach to food from governments, stressing that “hunger reduction and sustainable development are irrevocably connected, and that better governance of agriculture and food systems is key to achieving both targets.”

However, achieving global food security whilst reducing agriculture’s impact on the environment will prove difficult; agriculture is the largest employment sector worldwide and accounts for more land use than any other industry. However, that land is becoming degraded in a variety of ways and many of the resources on which agriculture relies will become less readily available this century. Western agriculture relies heavily on cheap oil, which is finite and worldwide the sector accounts for 70 per cent of fresh water use.

The FAO report reveals three quarters of the world’s hungry live in rural regions and most of them depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, furthermore, forty per cent of the world's degraded lands are in areas with high poverty rates. The report’s authors said, "Hunger puts in motion a vicious cycle of reduced productivity, deepening poverty, slow economic development and resource degradation."

Improve production methods, rather than implementing techno-fixes

As well as improving infrastructure, knowledge sharing and achieving a more equitable distribution of resources, the FAO report argues that globally, there is a need to encourage uptake of more sustainable diets, rather than adopting westernised diets which contain large amounts of resource-intensive meat and dairy and have led to health problems; whilst one billion of the world’s population suffer from hunger, another billion suffer from the effects of overeating.  

Furthermore, the FAO researchers explain there is a need to reduce waste throughout the food supply chain. Globally, food losses from field to fork account for 1.3 billion tonnes per year, or roughly one-third of the world food production for human consumption.

Finally, the researchers call on policy makers meeting in Rio de Janeiro to factor the environment into forthcoming decisions, offsetting economic considerations by taking ‘ecosystem services,’ services provided by nature at no cost such as pollination, clean water and fresh air into account.

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The FAO researchers promote an eco-system approach called Save and Grow to agriculture that draws on nature's contribution to agricultural growth, including soil organic matter, water flow regulation, pollination and natural predation of pests. The system looks at using greater precision in external input use and focuses on achieving more efficiency.  

The FAO said, despite predictions that by 2050 there will be a global population of 9 billion, the world can be fed adequately and sustainably if the correct measures are put in place. The FAO acknowledged that there is a need to increase food production, but that this has been overstated in the past; some, including UK government scientist John Beddington, have said the world needs to produce 70 per cent more food by 2050.

The Rome-based organisation has said implementing new, reduced-impact measures must go hand in hand with increasing equitable distribution throughout the world to ensure the world’s growing population is catered for; the report’s authors said, “The only way to ensure their food security is by creating decent jobs, paying better wages, giving them access to productive assets and distributing income in a more equitable way.”

Graziano da Silva added, "We must bring them into society, complementing support to smallholders and income generation opportunities with the strengthening of safety nets, cash for work and cash transfer programmes that contribute to strengthening of local production and consumption circuits, in an effort that must contribute to our sustainable development goals."

The organisation is calling for “bold policy decisions” to be made to enable more sustainable production; the report’s authors said achieving food security “depends on the choices made today in managing agricultural and food systems.”

The Rio+20 meeting will take place from 20th to 22nd June and will include 50,000 participants. Politicians are under pressure to adopt environmental and socially just measures in the spirit of the last Rio Earth Summit, held twenty years ago. However, the first Earth Summit was held twenty years before that in Stockholm, Sweden; at the summit policy makers were first exposed to the problems of hunger and anthropogenic pollution (that generated by humans).

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