UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Director-General, Qu Dongyu has called on the world’s richest nations to invest more in sustainable living, to feed the world’s growing population.
In his appeal to G20 environment ministers on Thursday, the head of the UN food relief agency highlighted the challenge of having to produce more food while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Today, humanity faces a triple planetary crisis of biodiversity loss, climate crisis and the impact of the pandemic,”he said. “To have healthy food, we need a healthy environment”.
The FAO chief spoke of the need to address water scarcity, which affects more than a billion people, by increasing efficiency and sustainable management.
Almost a billion hectares of rain-fed cropland and pastureland are also severely affected by recurring drought.
Qu argued that water-related challenges could be addressed through digital innovation, better oversight and investment.
He also called for stepping up biodiversity-friendly approaches, including more investments in related actions and slowing down biodiversity loss.
“Current levels of investment are highly insufficient,” the FAO director-general said.
He stressed that reversing deforestation “will help mitigate against climate change” and prevent disease outbreaks passing from animals to humans, adding that the economic benefits of halting biodiversity loss and land degradation, could amount to 1.4 trillion dollars per year.
The recently launched UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, led by FAO and the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), provides an “excellent opportunity to mobilise our collective efforts,” he said.
FAO is calling for urgent action to reverse the alarming rate of biodiversity loss, recommending scaled up mitigation approaches and actions across the food and agricultural sectors.
Qu emphasised the UN agency’s work was guided by the need to make agri-food systems more efficient, resilient, inclusive and sustainable – all with the aim of achieving the so-called “four betters”: better production, nutrition, environment and life, leaving no one behind.
The World Food Forum (WFF) – created for and led by the Food and Agriculture’s (FAO) Youth Committee – announced on Thursday the launch of an international competition in partnership with the non-profit Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC) to support and showcase entrepreneurs harnessing technology to drive the sustainable transformation of agri-food systems, to end world hunger.
The WFF Startup Innovation Awards will be presented on 2 October to the successful contestants who have built companies aligned to the “four betters”.
“The Extreme Tech Challenge AgTech, Food and Water competition category directly addresses FAO’s mission to defeat hunger worldwide and to achieve high-quality food security for all,” said FAO Deputy Director-General, Beth Bechdol.
“We are thrilled to join XTC in this partnership and to leverage their extraordinary pool of transformative startups to make a material impact in both of our organizations’ sustained efforts to tackle this global challenge”.
FAO urges G20 to invest heavily on food to feed world’s growing population
