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To Reverse Food Insecurity Build a Climate Resilient Agricultural Sector

The continued increase in food insecurity is making it clear that our current food systems are not resilient. How can we reverse these worrisome trends?

Small-holder farmer works on a community vegetable garden in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

URBANA, Illinois, Jun 16 2021 (IPS) - The number of people facing acute food insecurity has hit a five-year high, according to a recently released annual report by the Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC) – an international alliance of the United Nations, the European Union, governmental and non-governmental agencies working to tackle food crises. In addition, the report noted that 28 million people were one step away from starvation. This was attributed to conflict, economic shocks due to COVID-19 and climate change associated weather events.

The continued trajectory of increase in food insecurity is making it clear that our current food systems are not resilient.  Moreover, with climate change expected to continue to bring extreme events — from droughts to floods to invasive insects to deadly cyclones — it is likely going to get worse. We must urgently act to reverse these current trends.

The questions, then, become these: How can we reverse these worrisome trends? How can we ensure that people, across Africa and around the globe have the tools, technologies, and resources to be resilient to climate change?

Many farmers continue to rely on an agricultural system that remains rain-fed and underdeveloped. With limited access to infrastructure, current agricultural knowledge and reliable access to financial services, their ability to build a resilient agricultural system remains an unattainable dream

To answer these questions, we must re-examine the underpinning roots to food insecurity.

First off, most of the people affected by hunger live off the land, many as small holder farmers. They depend on agriculture, a sector that is highly vulnerable to climate change.

Furthermore, many farmers continue to rely on an agricultural system that remains rain-fed and underdeveloped. With limited access to infrastructure, current agricultural knowledge and reliable access to financial services, their ability to build a resilient agricultural system remains an unattainable dream.

Based on the challenges above, tackling rising food insecurity would greatly benefit from modernizing agriculture and making the agricultural sector resilient to climate change.

The good news is that building a resilient agricultural sector and dealing with climate-linked weather events such as drought, flooding, tropical cyclones, and insect invasions can benefit from science.  Science can help to develop climate-smart efficient water management technologies such as the drip irrigation, improved drought and flood tolerant crops and crops that are resistant to insects and plant diseases.  Also important are advances in improving and restoring soil health which is fundamental and key.

In addition to science, countries that continue to face food insecurity must invest in climate smart agricultural practices. As defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), climate smart agricultural practices are approaches that help to transform and reorient agricultural and food systems to effectively support development and ensure food security in a changing climate.

These approaches aim to sustainably increase agricultural productivity, adapt, and build resilience to climate change and reduce or remove greenhouse gas emissions. Many of the science-based solutions above are regarded as climate smart strategies.

Coupled with building climate smart strategies, is the need to invest in early warning systems, to ensure that farmers and citizens who continue to face hunger are not caught unawares. To do so, it is important that countries have access to reliable data.

Building resilient agricultural sectors must also go hand in hand with rebuilding rural communities’ infrastructures. Local roads, rural water, energy, and other infrastructures that are critical to ensuring an efficient and functioning agricultural supply chain.  Investing in upgrading rural communities should also result in job creation for the rural poor. It also could curtail urban migration, which continues to be an issue affecting many African countries.

Finally, all the above cannot happen and be sustainable without the strong presence of the people that are affected by climate change. They must be at the conversation tables where decisions are being made, or there should be appropriate channels to solicit their thoughts. Without these initiatives being locally driven, and involving broad coalition of stakeholders, we risk delivering unsustainable solutions that are heavily disconnected from the needs.

The task of achieving food security for all remains an enormous challenge. As we continue to invest in climate-smart strategies, upgrade rural infrastructure, and utilize science derived data evidence to improve agriculture and mitigate climate change associated weather events, we will make progress. We must do everything we can to fight food insecurity.

Dr. Esther Ngumbi is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a Senior Food Security Fellow with the Aspen Institute, New Voices.

 
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  • Red Robbo

    ‘ The number of people facing acute food insecurity has hit a five-year high, according to a recently released annual report by the Global Network Against Food Crises (GNAFC)..’.

    ‘There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery…’ This comment is as valid today, quite possibly more so, than when it first appeared as part of the introductory sentence to an article penned by Marx in the New York Daily Tribune of 16 September 1859. He observed that the ‘Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p.658).

    1898: Hence it has happened that the development of steam navigation, of railroads and telegraphs, of mechanical and chemical science, and the growth of the population, while enormously increasing productive power and the amount of material products—that is, of real wealth—at least ten times faster than the growth of the population, has given that enormous increase almost wholly to one class, comprising the landlords and capitalists, leaving the actual producers of it—the industrial workers and inventors—little, if any, better off than before.—(Alfred Russel Wallace, The Demon of Greed).

    1923: ‘Such a great production is already possible, with the knowledge already possessed by mankind’ (Pankhurst).

    1948: ‘A world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics’ (John Boyd Orr, former director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation).

    1951:’It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world-society of productive labor, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ ( Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy, 1951).

    All that is missing from establishing a world of free access is ‘the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat’ (Luxemburg).

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