For the first time in history, “safeguarding food security and ending hunger” is a fundamental global priority. That’s thanks to its inclusion in the final deal reached at the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt.
Agricultural groups and NGOs working to address food waste and sustainability welcome the move, but say those words need to be followed up with concrete action to ensure the world’s food systems are made more equitable, inclusive and resilient.
It’s no small task, either. A United Nations report in July warned the number of people going hungry rose to 828 million in 2021 – an increase of 150 million since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Studies, meanwhile, tell us that food production as it stands accounts for a third of global greenhouse emissions, with animal-based foods producing roughly twice the emissions of plant-based ones.
“We've got a food system that has enormously detrimental effects to the environment … biodiversity loss, use of land, use of water … and in the meantime it is failing in its primary goal, which is to nourish the world's population,” Oliver Camp, of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, or GAIN, told RFI.
“The population is still growing, so we've got some work to do to really improve the way our food systems work for the people and the planet.”
Historic progress
The issue of food and nutrition – and their links to the climate crisis – has gotten more attention at Cop27 than it has received at any previous Cop event.
Going into the summit, the World Wildlife Fund warned that slashing food systems emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 was crucial to meeting the target of capping warming at 1.5 degrees. This would mean changing the way we produce food, but also the way we consume it.
“We can phase out fossil fuels, but we can’t phase out food, so we have to transform food systems,” WWF’s Joao Campari told GreenBiz.
However while industry experts put forward solutions to reduce food loss and waste – making use of technology, investment and education – during discussion panels in the food and agriculture pavilions, countries did little to propose dedicated funding.
This was despite an open letter to world leaders from groups representing some 350 million farmers, fishers and forest producers warning that global food security was at risk if governments did not support a shift from industrial agriculture toward more diverse, small-scale production.
"The surge in hunger over the last year has exposed the fragility of a global food system" ill-equipped for climate shocks, the letter said, adding that "building a food system that can feed the world on a hot planet” needed to be a priority for Cop27.
In contrast, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged to spend $1.4 billion over four years to help smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia cope with climate change.
“Every moment the world delays action, more people suffer, and the solutions become more complex and costly,” the foundation’s chief executive Mark Suzman said.
