Feeding world while preserving environment key to achieve SDG 2 – IFAD

Ending poverty and hunger top the list of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, but achieving this shared ambition by 2030 will only happen if the world finds the right balance between meeting rising food demands while simultaneously preserving the environment and building community resilience, according to Gilbert F. Houngbo, the President of the United Nations International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Already more than 800 million people go to bed hungry each night, a man-made travesty that will only worsen as agriculture is increasingly affected by climate change. It is estimated that by 2050, 22 percent of cultivated areas will suffer impacts, agricultural production will shrink and rising ocean temperatures and acid levels will lead to declines in fish stocks. At the same time, demand for food will more than double as the urban population grows.

“How we switch food from being a driver of many of our greatest global health and environmental challenges to instead becoming a powerful tool for tackling them, is one of the most critical questions of our time,” says Alessandro Demaio, CEO of EAT. “Just as these challenges are intimately intertwined, our actions to address them must be integrated across sectors, disciplines and continents. As such, the work of international organizations such as IFAD is critical, and our hope is that the leaders and experts converging in Stockholm this week will make decisive contributions toward the urgent food transformation that is needed to meet the 2030 Agenda.”

Each year the EAT Stockholm Food Forum attracts more than 500 top global leaders from science, politics, business, and civil society to share knowledge and best practices, and coordinate action across sectors and disciplines to tackle the intertwined challenges of the global food system. Other speakers alongside Houngbo will include Sweden’s Minister for International Development Cooperation and Climate and Deputy Prime Minister Isabella Lövin and Norway’s Minister of International Development Nikolai Astrup.

IFAD has invested in rural people for 40 years, empowering them to reduce poverty, increase food security, improve nutrition and strengthen resilience. Since 1978, we have provided about US$20.2 billion in grants and low-interest loans to projects that have reached some 476 million people. IFAD is an international financial institution and a specialized United Nations agency based in Rome – the UN’s food and agriculture hub.

Original source: IFAD
Published on 07 June 2018