Energy and food security are often dealt with separately, yet energy is directly and indirectly embedded in food production and preparation. Bearing in mind the expected population growth, food production needs to be increased by 70% to feed the world in 2050.
FAO on behalf of the United Nations has designated 2014 as the International Year of Family Farming (IYFF), which will culminate in the presentation of a discussion brief on Family Farming at the World Food Day in October.
The EAT forum was an opportunity to hear from a wide array of world-renowned experts about their work related to sustainability, food and nutrition. From having not attended the first day, I came in fresh faced and full of energy. I got the impression from the first few speakers that the dinner the night before was a late one.
“How can we change the food system in order for it to provide us with healthy food, save environment and make a business sense?” “Should we give up on our planet if the solutions don’t make business sense?” and “Does food production need stricter regulation and how does business get on board of the global race for sustainability?”
We have long known that what we eat affects our health, but we are only beginning to grasp how much our food affects the environment, close to home and around the world.
Protracted crises are among the most challenging contexts in which to fight food insecurity and malnutrition. Driven by multiple underlying causes such as recurrent natural or human made disasters, weak governance and unsustainable livelihood systems, protracted crises affect an estimated 366 million people worldwide.
In the past scaling-up in agriculture was all about the ways extension could help informing farmers more effectively and about application of the good agricultural practice research.
The development of knowledge based bio-economies is increasingly seen as a pathway towards a sustainable economic growth based on renewable resources, moving away from the fossil fuel economy and responding to pressing local and global challenges, including climate change.
The world is becoming a more urbanized place, currently about 50% of the worlds´ population lives in cities and the proportion is expected to increase to almost 70% in 2050. The increase is likely to be particularly prominent in Africa and Asia, where urban population is expected to double between 2000 and 2030.