By 2050, global agricultural production will need to increase by at least 60 percent from 2006, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Both CGIAR and FAO are in the midst of priority setting efforts to identify how they can help accomplish this, in a global situation rife with challenges: high population growth at least until mid-century, substantially growing incomes of the poorest people (changing the pattern of food demand), and unprecedented stresses on agricultural productivity due to climate change.
The first-ever Food Security Futures conference, convened in Dublin last week, brought together a wide range of institutions and organizations to assess these challenges and provide inputs into the ongoing discussions on how best to use the human and institutional resources of these two organizations.
We already know a great deal about how actors in food systems need to do things differently. To address nutrition, farmers and processors will need to offer healthier and safer foods, and consumers will need to modify diets and behavior. To address climate change with justice, the poorest farmers, fishers, and pastoralists—who are disproportionately affected—will need knowledge and resources to adapt. To handle the pressure from increased frequency of droughts, floods, pests, and diseases, our trading system’s logistics and infrastructure need to be made more resilient. And governments need to review and revise the policy environment to make it more supportive of sustainable food security.
However, much remains unknown about how to accomplish these goals on the ground in developing countries.
Conference participants, who included representatives from academia, the private sector, national agricultural research systems, and civil society organizations, agreed that agricultural research by the public and private sectors is essential for developing new approaches to meet the challenge of feeding a growing world population sustainably.
Below are highlights from the conference conclusions:
The challenges
* Increasing weather variability is likely to be at least as important as changes in weather averages.
* Pest and disease pressure will likely become more serious threats to productivity.
* The ability of natural resources to deliver critical services is under increasing threat.
* Providing enough macro- and micronutrients is still critical, but obesity is a rising problem everywhere.
The priorities
Better information
* Better understanding of how to provide justice for the poor as we address climate change.
* More robust assessments of the contributions of natural resource systems management.
* Better metrics for evaluating food systems and natural resources.
* Increased emphasis on gender to serve both agricultural and nutritional objectives.
* More collaboration to improve agriculture and economic models to identify research investment priorities.
Better policies and programs
* Greater collaboration between the public and private sectors to share data and models.
* Increased production and use of non-staples for dietary diversity and food security.
* Improving mineral and vitamin content of staples in breeding and yield-boosting efforts.
* New and greater collaboration among ministries of agriculture, health, sanitation, and finance to address challenges holistically.
* Identification and reduction of barriers to adoption of responses to climate change.
Better policies and programs in the face of these challenges require better information, and research based on that information. FAO and the CGIAR have the human and institutional resources to make critically needed advances, and cooperation will make those resources more effective. As the conference concluded, they renewed their commitments to foster this cooperation, working with private firms, national research systems, and civil society. We need to hold them to that commitment.
