A world without hunger
Written by Matt Grobis
Safe, nutritious, and sufficient food, all year, for all people: the United Nation’s second Sustainable Development Goal aims to transform the world’s agriculture and distribution of food by 2030. With 800 million people suffering from hunger — more than 10% of the world’s population — food and agriculture are key to achieving the entire set of sustainable development goals.
Currently, there exists enough food to supply every person on the planet with a nutritious diet. Yet, large imbalances in access to this food also exist. This is often due to the cycle of poverty: people in poverty cannot afford nutritious food, which weakens them and then limits their ability to earn enough money to escape poverty. The results can be devastating. Poor nutrition is responsible for nearly 45% of deaths in children under 5, as well as causing a quarter of the world’s children to be stunted, or unable to develop normally.
Feeding future generations is similarly troubling. We have dedicated approximately 11% of the world’s land surface to agriculture (1.5 billion hectares), but to feed an expected 9 billion people in 2050, we will have to expand our global food production by 60%. Where will this land come from? We can work to improve crop yield from existing land, but the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cautions that in many cases, local socioeconomic conditions “will not favor the promotion of the technological changes required to ensure the sustainable intensification of land use.” In other words, we can increase our food yield, but do we have the infrastructure in place to do it sustainably?
These are formidable challenges that require fast, efficient, and long-lasting solutions. By no exaggeration, the wellbeing and lives of billions of people — both present and future — depend on the actions taken to address hunger. The UN has therefore made ending world hunger a priority. “We can no longer look at food, livelihoods and the management of natural resources separately,” the FAO wrote in their 2016 bulletin Food and Agriculture. “A focus on rural development and investment in agriculture — crops, livestock, forestry, fisheries and aquaculture — are powerful tools to end poverty and hunger, and bring about sustainable development.”
How can we address problems as pervasive as hunger, when those problems are intimately linked with Earth’s other greatest challenges, such as poverty and climate change? For the FAO, the answer is to find solutions that address as many of these challenges simultaneously. In Darfur, Sudan, for example, the FAO is working to introduce fuel-efficient stoves that reduce the need for fuelwood, the principal source of energy that is becoming an increasingly limited natural resource. Women must travel far from home to collect fuelwood, which decreases the time they can invest in childcare, work, or education while also exposing themselves to the risk of physical or sexual violence. Mud stoves, on the other hand, require less fuelwood and produce no smoke. The local production of these stoves generates income for women.
“Tackling hunger and malnutrition is not only about boosting food production, but also to do with increasing incomes, creating resilient food systems and strengthening markets so that people can access safe and nutritious food even if a crisis prevents them from growing enough themselves.”
— Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Food and Agriculture
For Darfur, fuel-efficient stoves not only improve food security, hence addressing the UN’s second sustainable development goal of eradicating hunger. They also help decrease poverty (SDG #1), and they promote health and wellbeing (#3), gender equality (#5), affordable and clean energy (#7), climate action (#13), and protecting life on land (#15). Addressing the world’s largest challenges will require such multifaceted approaches.
Matt Grobis is a 4th-year PhD candidate in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Managing Editor of Highwire Earth. He researches the collective dynamics of fish schools in response to predation risk. Follow him on Twitter @mgrobis.
