As reliable sources of quality food diminish and record numbers of people are driven to hunger due to conflicts, climate change and economic downturns, feeding the global population of eight billion poses a major challenge that demands better food early warning information systems.
In the past decade, several global initiatives have been launched by regional and international organizations and even by individual countries to address food security challenges such as the UN Global Crisis Response Group, the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program, Global Alliance for Food Security (GAFS) in the G7, the Global Food Security Summit, and the Global Food Security Forum held on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty (G20).
“All of these initiatives have come with meaningful, if also in several respects notoriously vague, action plans along similar lines as the GAFS, such that at a first joint meeting of G20 Finance and Agriculture Ministers it was agreed to undertake a mapping exercise first before moving ahead with a joint and concerted agenda at the level of the G20,” says Rob Vos, director of Markets, Trade and Institutions Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute.
“While we have much greater recognition of the urgency to address global food security challenges and the need to do so in a concerted manner, a more concrete and actionable agenda is yet to emerge,” Vos tells SciDev.Net.
“Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food. This we cannot guarantee by setting standards for food, but what we can and should do is to step up efforts to create the necessary conditions that enable people to access sufficient food,” Vos adds.
Republished in Phys.org, and Eco-Business