Food systems: seven priorities to end hunger and protect the planet

[NNadir]

A comment in Nature, probably open sourced:

Food systems: seven priorities to end hunger and protect the planet

Subtitle: Here’s how the United Nations should harness science and technology to improve nutrition and safeguard the environment.

(Joachim von Braun , Kaosar Afsana , Louise O. Fresco & Mohamed Hassan) Nature, Comment August 31, 2021.)

I have long been considering the idea that one of the major causes of environmental degradation is, in fact, poverty, although it's not immediately clear I think to everyone; the relation, I admit is not obvious. So this commentary caught my eye.

Some excerpts:

School children in Madagascar eat lunch provided as part of a nutrition initiative run by the World Food Programme. Credit: Rijasolo/AFP/Getty

The world’s food system is in disarray. One in ten people is undernourished. One in four is overweight. More than one-third of the world’s population cannot afford a healthy diet. Food supplies are disrupted by heatwaves, floods, droughts and wars. The number of people going hungry in 2020 was 15% higher than in 2019, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic and armed conflicts1.

Our planetary habitat suffers, too. The food sector emits about 30% of the world’s greenhouse gases. Expanding cropland, pastures and tree plantations drive two-thirds of the loss in forests (5.5 million hectares per year), mostly in the tropics2. Poor farming practices degrade soils, pollute and deplete water supplies and lower biodiversity.

As these interlinkages become clear, approaches to food are shifting — away from production, consumption and value chains towards safety, networks and complexity. Recent crises around global warming and COVID-19 have compounded concerns. Policymakers have taken note.


Counting the hidden $12-trillion cost of a broken food system

In September, the United Nations secretary-general, António Guterres, will convene a Food Systems Summit. This is only the sixth UN summit on food since 1943, and the first with heads of states in the UN General Assembly...

... Seven priorities
Science-driven advances are needed to address the following challenges.

End hunger and improve diets. Scientists need to identify optimal conditions and opportunities for investments to make healthy and nutritious foods more available, affordable and accessible. Measures that jointly improve more than one of these are most effective. For example, increased irrigation on small farms in Tanzania and Ethiopia has enhanced productivity, dietary diversity and farmers’ incomes5.

Three big game-changers are: enhancing research and development in agriculture and food to increase productivity in a sustainable way; slashing food waste and losses; and adding income and nutrition components to social-protection programmes. Research priorities to cut waste include scaling up solar energy and battery storage technologies to make food processing and preservation more affordable...

Please note that I do not agree in any way with the last statement in any way. Solar energy and batteries are not sustainable, and the battery industry in particular, exploits poverty in an appalling way. (DRC cobalt mining.) Clean energy is possible but solar and batteries are not clean energy and their failure to address climate change after more than a half a century of cheering is fairly obvious.

De-risk food systems. The more global, dynamic and complex food systems become, the more open they are to new risks. Scientists need to improve how they understand, monitor, analyse and communicate such vulnerabilities. For example, droughts, the expansion of biofuels and financial speculation after the sudden imposition of trade barriers led to food price hikes in 20087. The COVID-19 pandemic and armed conflicts have shaken food value chains across Africa this year, driving up food prices. Successful initiatives exist, combining on-the-ground observations of food systems and nutrition with forecasting. These include FEWS NET (https://fews.net) and the joint analyses from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme on early warnings of food insecurity8...

...Protect equality and rights. Poverty and inequalities associated with gender, ethnicity and age restrict many people’s access to healthy foods. Socio-economic researchers need to suggest inclusive ways to transform the more than 400 million smallholder farms worldwide. They must identify pathways out of inequitable and unfair arrangements over land, credit and labour, and empower the rights of women and youth. For example, if female-headed households in southern Ethiopia had the same resources as male-headed ones, their productivity in maize (corn) would increase by more than 40%, to match that of the latter10.

Protecting the land rights of smallholders, women and Indigenous peoples is paramount. Technology can ensure transparency and efficiency. For example, using blockchain ledgers of ownership rights to allocate land could be an opportunity in Ghana11. At the trans-national scale, the Land Matrix Initiative collects and shares data on big land acquisitions and investments in low- and middle-income countries; it covers deals in almost 100 nations worldwide. Similar solutions are needed to protect the land rights of Indigenous peoples12...

...Boost bioscience. Researchers need to find ways to restore soil health and improve the efficiency of cropping, crop breeding and recarbonizing the soil and biosphere. Linkages among all Earth systems must be considered together — known as a One Health approach...

... Plant-breeding techniques that capture nitrogen from the air, to reduce the need for fertilizers and increase nutrients, should be investigated. Genetic engineering and biotechnology should be applied to increase the productivity, quality and resistance of crops to pests and drought. Recent examples include banana varieties that are resistant to Fusarium wilt fungal diseases, and pest-resistant Bt aubergines. To widen access to bioscience technologies, intellectual-property rights, skills and data sharing should be addressed...

The use of biotechnology will not be popular with a certain subset of bourgeois "antis." For example, the international ignorance organization Greenpeace opposes genetic engineering, this at the expense of the health of poor people. Nobel Laureate Richard Roberts has been a leader in fighting the ignorance of Greenpeace in this area. 107 Nobel laureates sign letter blasting Greenpeace over GMOs. Fighting ignorance is not now and never has been an easy task but I applaud these scientists for putting their prestige behind this fight.

...Sustain aquatic foods. Most of the focus on food so far has been on soil-based agriculture. Fish, shellfish and aquatic plants such as seaweed have much to offer nutritionally and environmentally. Aquatic foods need to be better integrated into the understanding of food systems14. Researchers should look for ways to increase nutritional diversity in aquatic foods and sequester carbon in marine and freshwater environments...

...Harness digital technology. Robots, sensors and artificial intelligence are increasingly used on farms: to harvest crops and milk cows, for example. Sensors can monitor the origin and quality of ingredients and products along the food-processing chain to reduce losses and guarantee food safety. But most farmers and producers still don’t have access. To spread the benefits, devices need to become cheaper and easier to purchase and use. Rental services similar to Uber for farm machinery should be developed, as has been done with tractors in India. Rural electricity supplies will have to be expanded, along with IT training and education...

Although I don't agree with specifics, for example, so called "renewable energy" in this commentary, overall it makes some important points.