{"id":6700,"date":"2023-05-17T14:21:55","date_gmt":"2023-05-17T14:21:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/euromenaenergy.com\/?p=6700"},"modified":"2023-05-17T14:21:55","modified_gmt":"2023-05-17T14:21:55","slug":"sustainable-food-not-more-of-it-needed-as-global-hunger-soars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/?p=6700","title":{"rendered":"Sustainable food \u2014 not more of it \u2014 needed as global hunger soars"},"content":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2013\u00a0<\/span>As global hunger swiftly rises \u2014 by more than a third last year \u2014 curbing it will require not growing more food but rethinking broader systems of trade and aid, farming\u2019s heavy reliance on fossil fuels, food waste and meat eating, experts said.<\/p>\n

Farmers today grow sufficient crops to feed twice the current population \u2014 but but nearly a third of food produced globally is spoiled or thrown away, said Philip Lymbery, the chief executive of Compassion in World Farming International.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

At the same time, grain that could feed billions of people is instead fed to factory-raised food animals \u2014 suggesting a reduction in meat consumption is one clear way to cut hunger, he said at a conference on global food systems in London last week.<\/p>\n

In Europe alone, 60% of grain is now grown for animal food, said Tim Benton, a food systems expert at the London-based think tank Chatham House, which raises questions about whether scarce land could be better used.<\/p>\n

As global leaders look for ways to keep food available and affordable, and prevent rising hunger, \u201cit\u2019s not about food scarcity because there\u2019s no food scarcity,\u201d Lymbery noted.<\/p>\n

Surging hunger<\/h3>\n

Globally, hunger is surging, with 258 million people in nearly 60 countries facing acute food insecurity last year, a 33% jump from 2021, according to the Global Report on Food Crises 2023, released in March.<\/p>\n

Problems are growing not just in traditional aid recipient countries such as Yemen, Somalia and Afghanistan but also in nations from Nigeria to the Democratic Republic of Congo, it showed.<\/p>\n

The report, backed by agencies from the U.N. World Food Program to the World Bank, found that climate change impacts \u2014 from floods in Pakistan to drought in the Horn of Africa \u2014 were key contributors to the surge.<\/p>\n

But conflicts \u2014 including Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, which slashed wheat exports from Ukraine and drove up the prices of energy and fossil fuel-based fertilizers \u2014 also played a major role, particularly in contributing to rising food prices.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe depend more and more on a small number of countries for production of the major crops we depend on,\u201d said Olivier De Schutter, co-chair of IPES-Food, an international expert panel on sustainable food systems.<\/p>\n

That means when climate change slashes production in one or more key producers, or a conflict breaks out in one, \u201cglobal supply chains are disrupted \u2026 (and) the whole global food system is impacted.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the wake of the Ukraine invasion, food costs also rose as speculators, hedge funds and a handful of big agribusiness companies that control most global food trade made profits, said De Schutter, who is also a U.N. special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.<\/p>\n

He suggested that finding ways to wean global agricultural production off its heavy reliance on fossil fuel-based fertilizers could be a key way to protect access to food from volatile oil and gas prices.<\/p>\n

Helping poorer countries escape their often heavy debt burdens could also help them shore up their food security, allowing them to focus more on growing food for their own people rather than raising export crops to bring in the cash needed to service debt, De Schutter said.<\/p>\n

Competing answers<\/h3>\n

Benton, of Chatham House, said two very different views of how to achieve future security are now competing.<\/p>\n

In the first, the assumption that the world will need 50% more food by 2050 \u2014 in part to meet growing demand for meat and dairy as poor countries grow richer \u2014 demands much more intensive production from limited agricultural land.<\/p>\n

That view assumes agriculture in the future will become much more technological and centralized, with heavy use of drones, satellites and the \u201cinternet of things\u201d driving smarter production \u2014 and likely resulting in fewer farm jobs.<\/p>\n

The second view, however, envisions farmers shifting to more ecologically friendly, smaller-scale and less fossil fuel-intensive agriculture, with food demand not growing significantly because food waste is cut and meat-intensive diets decline.<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody agrees food system transformation is needed\u201d \u2014 just not what kind, said Molly Anderson, a food studies professor at Middlebury College in the United States.<\/p>\n

Seth Watkins, a farmer in the U.S. state of Iowa, said at last week\u2019s food conference that he had seen first-hand how intensive farming systems were damaging soil health, raising questions about the long-term viability of farming, especially as climate change impacts worsen.<\/p>\n

\u201cOften (a focus on) technology holds us back from the sustainable solutions we need to fix our food system,\u201d he said, calling for a switch to more environmentally friendly and low-carbon ways of producing food.<\/p>\n

Decisions made now are crucial because \u201cit\u2019s our own regeneration or extinction we\u2019re talking about,\u201d Watkins said.<\/p>\n

Susan Chomba, director of the Vital Landscapes in Africa program for the World Resources Institute, said efforts to cut food waste were particularly crucial as key farm resources from available land to water grow scarcer.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter how much we try to produce, if we can\u2019t address what is lost and wasted it\u2019s a counterproductive process,\u201d she said in an interview.<\/p>\n

A range of powerful vested interests stand in the way of shifting food systems to effectively manage growing hunger, climate threats and ecological decline, the analysts said.<\/p>\n

Worsening disinformation and a rise in authoritarian governments around the world also are acting as a brake on change, they said.<\/p>\n

But with hunger growing fast and new challenges appearing \u2014 from an expected drought-spawning El Nino weather pattern emerging this June to new conflict in Sudan, adding to humanitarian burdens \u2014 public discontent and pressures on politicians for change are also likely to increase.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause we\u2019re not tackling the environmental crisis, the disruptions we see are going to get bigger and bigger,\u201d warned Benton of Chatham House.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LONDON \u2013\u00a0As global hunger swiftly rises \u2014 by more than a third last year \u2014 curbing it will require not growing more food but rethinking broader systems of trade and aid, farming\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9,10],"tags":[40,46,48,50,57,68,76,77,78,79,80,82,86,87,88,90,95,96,98,99,103,107,109,111,112,114,121,123,137,139,146,148,153,159,174,176,181,182,184,187,196,201,202,203,209,217,221,222,229,231,232,233,239,241,244,246,249,250,251,252,256,262,263,266,268,277,279,280,283,285,288,300],"class_list":["post-6700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-clean-energy","category-climate","category-climateaction","tag-alleviation","tag-aramco","tag-athens","tag-athensenergydialogues","tag-baroudi","tag-carbon","tag-climate","tag-climate-change","tag-climateaction","tag-climatechange","tag-closure-of-nuclear","tag-co2","tag-cyprus","tag-decarbonising","tag-decarbonization","tag-democracy","tag-disputes","tag-doha","tag-east","tag-eastmed","tag-egypt","tag-embargo","tag-emissions","tag-energy","tag-energy-market","tag-energyindustry","tag-europe","tag-european-fuels","tag-gas","tag-gazprom","tag-greece","tag-greenenergy","tag-hydrocarbons","tag-international","tag-lebanon","tag-liquefied-natural-gas","tag-maritime","tag-maritime-boundaries","tag-maritime-disputes","tag-mediterranean","tag-natural-gas","tag-offshore","tag-oil","tag-oil-and-gas","tag-opec","tag-peace","tag-plants","tag-pollution","tag-poverty","tag-power","tag-putin","tag-qatar","tag-renewable-energy","tag-reserves","tag-rosneft","tag-roudi","tag-russia","tag-russia-in-the-european-energy-sector","tag-russian-gas","tag-russian-sanctions","tag-saudi","tag-solar","tag-solar-power","tag-straddling","tag-sustainability","tag-total","tag-trump","tag-turkey","tag-ukrain","tag-unclos","tag-usa","tag-300"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emimer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}