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Eradicating hunger, rapid transformations of farming must go hand in hand
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Wednesday, 19 October, 2016, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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Rome
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fiogf49gjkf0d The pledge to eradicate hunger and poverty must go hand in hand with rapid transformations of farming and food systems to cope with a warmer world. This was stated by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in a report titled The State of Food and Agriculture 2016.
Agriculture, including forestry, fisheries and livestock production, generate around a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. According to the report, it must contribute more to combating climate change and brace to overcome its impacts.
“There is no doubt climate change affects food security,” stated José Graziano da Silva, director general, FAO, while presenting the report. He added, “What climate change does is brings back uncertainties from the time we were all hunter-gatherers. We cannot assure any more that we will have the harvest we have planted.”
Graziano da Silva noted that that uncertainty also translated into volatile food prices. He added, “Everybody is paying for that, not only those suffering from droughts.”
FAO warned that a business as usual approach could put millions more people at risk of hunger compared to a future without climate change.
Most affected would be populations in poor areas in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia, especially those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Future food security in many countries will worsen if no action is taken today.
The report emphasised that overhauling farming and food systems will be complex due to the vast number of stakeholders involved, the multiplicity of farming and food processing systems and differences in ecosystems. “Yet, efforts must begin in earnest now as the adverse impacts of climate change will only worsen with time,” it added.
“The benefits of adaptation outweigh the costs of inaction by very wide margins,” stated Graziano da Silva.
Time for commitments to be put into action
“The year 2016 should be about putting commitments into action,” urged the FAO chief, noting the international community last year agreed to the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement, about to come into force. Agriculture will be high on the agenda at the 22nd Conference of the Parties in Morocco, which commences on November 7, 2016.
The report underscored that success in transforming food and agriculture systems would largely depend on urgently supporting smallholders in adapting to climate change.
Developing countries are home to around half-a-billion smallholder farm families who produce food and other agricultural products in greatly varying agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions. Solutions have to be tailored to those conditions. There is no one-size-fits-all fix.
The report described alternative, economically viable ways of helping smallholders to adapt and making the livelihoods of rural populations — often the most exposed to the downside risks of climate change - more resilient.
It provided evidence that adoption of climate-smart practices, such as the use of nitrogen-efficient and heat-tolerant crop varieties, zero-tillage and integrated soil fertility management would boost productivity and farmers’ incomes.
“Widespread adoption of nitrogen-efficient practices alone would reduce the number of people at risk of undernourishment by more than 100 million,” the report estimated.
It also identified avenues to lower emission intensity from agriculture. Water-conserving alternatives to the flooding of rice paddies, for example, can slash methane emissions by 45 per cent, while emissions from the livestock sector can be reduced by up to 41 per cent through the adoption of more efficient practices.
FAO’s road map also identified policies and financing opportunities for the sustainable intensification of agriculture.
The way forward
Negative global effects of climate change are already being felt in some cereal crop yields. Climate change will likely lead to a loss of nutritional content of some foods, such as declining zinc, iron and protein counts in staple cereals, and trigger new health issues — including diarrhoea for humans and an array of trans-boundary animal diseases.
Beyond 2030, according to scientific evidence, negative pressures on food production will be increasingly felt everywhere. Until then, the adverse impacts of higher temperatures are sharply skewed towards developing countries, pointing to dimmer prospects for their food self-sufficiency.
Helping smallholders adapt to climate change risks is critical for global poverty reduction and food security. The report said, “Close attention should be paid to removing obstacles they may face and fostering an enabling environment for individual, joint and collective action.”
FAO urged policy makers to identify and remove such barriers. These obstacles can include input subsidies that promote unsustainable farming practices, poorly aligned incentives and inadequate access to markets, credit, extension services and social protection programmes, and often disadvantage women, who make up to 43 per cent of the agricultural labour force.
The report stressed that more climate finance is needed to fund developing countries’ actions on climate change. International public finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation is growing and, while still relatively small, can act as a catalyst to leverage larger flows of public and private investments.
More climate finance needs to flow to sustainable agriculture, fisheries and forestry to fund the large-scale transformation and the development of climate-smart food production systems. Adaptation and mitigation of climate change must occur in tandem.
“Without action, agriculture will continue to be a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. But by adopting climate-smart practices and increasing the capacity of soils and forests to sequester carbon, emissions can be reduced while stepping up food production to feed the world’s growing population,” the report said.
Food systems can further contribute by minimising food losses and waste, as well as by promoting healthier diets that also leave a lighter environmental footprint.
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