Feeding the planet puts a lot of stress on the environment. Farming already takes more than 40 per cent of the dry land and half the world's available fresh water. The simplest way to grow more food is to use more land but it would come with a major environmental cost. Climate change, on the other hand, is putting a lot of strain on our food supply. So, the fundamental challenges and dilemmas we are facing today include: how to grow more using less in a sustainable manner; how to optimise the entire food value chain reducing the carbon footprint from field to fork, protect the environment and support biological diversity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy.
The world population now stands at seven billion and, shockingly, one in seven of these people is already hungry. By 2050, the population is expected to reach nine billion. What does that mean for food security and hunger? With almost 870 million people chronically undernourished in 2010-2012, the number of hungry people in the world remains unspeakably high.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), most of these people are in Asia, including Bangladesh. It is clear from the regional impacts of the 2008 food crisis that the central dilemma for Asia is how to guarantee food security in the context of growing demand for food while the production of food is constrained by, among other things, climate change.
Despite Asia's unprecedented economic growth and advances in science and technology, there has been an increase in poverty and stagnation in average crop yields. The problem of food security remains a major challenge because of destabilising factors such as competition for land, rural-urban migration, rapid urbanisation, population growth, climate change, and the increasing shortages of energy and water.
Currently, this region is home to two-thirds of the world's poor, with 947 million people living on less than $1.25 a day. To feed the growing population, we may need to raise productivity by 70 per cent by the year 2050. However, the attempt to increase food production has become a major food security challenge, which is now compounded by climate change. Similar to food security, climate change is a multidimensional issue. The impacts of climate change on the four dimensions of food security, namely, availability, physical and economic access, and utilisation are complex as these impacts are also linked to other factors influencing the changing climate.
Regarding the historical impacts of climate change on food production, scientific findings have shown that rising temperatures increasingly affect food crops. It is projected that based on a scenario of an increase of 2.0 degrees celsius (without taking into account changes in rainfall patterns), production of major food crops would decline.
In the last century, dietary patterns of the world shifted from traditional food to wheat-based diet to animal protein and other high value foods such as meat, fruits and vegetables to different exotic foods (shrimp, lobster, shark fins etc) for wealthy buyers. Despite these shifts in dietary patterns, food security continues to remain a critical issue for many.
While some experts have argued that an increase in food production to meet future demand is inevitable, others suggest that to reduce global hunger, economic growth needs to be accompanied by purposeful and decisive public actions as well as including the poor in the process. The latter group of experts also suggest that feeding the middles class of the world is actually draining the resources of the planet and taking the resources away from the planet's poor, with climate change exacerbating it. Increased productivity is perhaps a part of the solution, but the real solution lies in "global food justice". This includes creating access to food, finding alternative sources of food, changing food habits away from exotic foods to more environmentally-friendly ones, establishing a global food bank for the impoverished and global food governance.
Climate change pushes national and regional actors to embark upon numerous initiatives, for example, food security initiatives. As these initiatives are often not driven by a genuine intention to protect the environment, ensure food security and address the need of the poor, but by projecting a "green façade" and finding economic opportunities alone, success of such initiatives is slim. While there are prospects for regional cooperation and opportunities, competing and conflicting interests on power and resources further fragment the region.
Economic growth is necessary but it is not sufficient to tackle climate change and accelerate reduction of hunger and malnutrition unless it is accompanied by robust public policies centred on the conditions of the poor and the disadvantaged. Food security can be sufficiently solved by higher income and trade, with distribution/equality improvements.
Dr. Md Saidul Islam is an Assistant Professor of Sociology, at Nanyang Technological
University, Singapore.
© 2024 - All Rights with The Financial Express
