Fragile climate puts food security at risk: UN report-‘Increasing farm output is hard given the fragility of the natural resource base’
- Feeding a hungry planet is growing increasingly difficult as climate change and depletion of land and other resources undermine food systems, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization said as it renewed appeals for better policies and technologies to reach “zero hunger.”
- Population growth requires supplies of more nutritious food at affordable prices, but increasing farm output is hard given the “fragility of the natural resource base” since humans have outstripped Earth’s carrying capacity in terms of land, water and climate change, the report said.
- The FAO and International Food Policy Research Institute released the report at the outset of a global conference aimed at speeding up efforts to achieve zero hunger around the world.
Civil strife, conflicts
- Food security remains tenuous for many millions of people, who lack access to affordable, adequately nourishing diets for a variety of reasons, the most common being poverty.
- It is noted that the number of hungry and malnourished people in the world has risen to levels last seen a decade ago.
- The FAO estimates that global demand for food will jump by half from 2013 to 2050.
- Farmers can expand land use to help make up some of the difference, but that option is constrained in places like Asia and the Pacific and urbanisation is eating up still more land that once may have been used for agriculture.
- Increasing farm output beyond sustainable levels can cause permanent damage to ecosystems, the report said, noting that it often causes soil erosion, pollution with plastic mulching, pesticides and fertilizers, and a loss of biodiversity.
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