By Alan Dangour
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| Female agricultural workers picking vegetables in Mirpurkhas Photo credit: Waseem Gazdar |
The 2015 Sustainable
Development Goals and the UN Decade of Action on
Nutrition call on all countries to end hunger and prevent
malnutrition in all its forms by 2030. This is quite a challenge, and it
is a challenge with sustainable agriculture and food systems at its very heart.
And the current situation doesn’t look good. The
latest State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report
estimates that in 2016 the number of chronically undernourished people actually
increased to 815 million (up from 777 million in 2015). The report
identifies that the food security situation has particularly declined in parts
of sub-Saharan Africa, South-Eastern, and Western Asia, and especially in
situations of conflict as well as conflict combined with severe climatic events
such as droughts and floods.
Sustainable Development Goal 2 also sets the world targets that
agricultural productivity and the incomes of small-scale food producers should
double by 2030. At the same time food production systems should be
sustainable, reduce their impact on ecosystems and be resilient to environmental
change. But here again we are facing major challenges. The latest evidence from
advanced global crop models suggests, for example, that global
yields of wheat, rice, maize, and soybean will decline substantially with the
predicted increase in global temperatures in the coming years.
Recently, the Sustainable and Healthy Diets in India project led
by the London School of Hygiene
& Tropical Medicine calculated for the first time the greenhouse gas and water footprints of
food production in India and estimated the dietary changes required
to meet future declining groundwater availability. These are among the
first research efforts in South Asia to quantify the links between environmental
sustainability and food and nutrition security at a time when, because of rapid
urbanisation, transitions in diets and increasing populations, the food system
is under increasing pressure.
So what sustainable agriculture and food systems are there that
can ensure food and nutrition security in the future for South
Asia? The LANSA programme is working with local communities in
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan to identify farming system
interventions that address community nutritional inadequacies, reduce environmental impacts, and also increase resilience to environmental stressors. These are
important first steps in the generation of novel evidence to help meet current
and future agriculture and food system challenges.
But the challenges the world faces are likely to be very
great. Are we happy that we as a community working in agriculture, food
systems, public health, and policy are really doing enough to respond?
Let’s begin to answer this!
Join the LANSA Consortium three-week online discussion on FAO’s Food and Nutrition Security Forum from October 23 until
November 10, 2017. Voice your concerns, share your opinion and examples of good
practice, and network with scientists across the agriculture-nutrition
space.
To receive registration details, send an email to lansa.southasia@gmail.com by October 20,
2017.
*This blog was first published on the SecureNutrition website on 11th October 2017: http://www.securenutrition.org/blog-entry/sustainable-farming-systems-food-and-nutrition-security
