FAO points out that harvests would have to double to reach 24 percent, while animal meat production would have to grow 31 percent. The challenge of achieving zero hunger by 2030, one of the UN’s main sustainable development goals, “will not be met if the current situation continues,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned on Wednesday.
The report “Agricultural Outlook 2022-2031”, prepared jointly with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and presented on Wednesday reveals that the goal of eliminating hunger in the next eight years will not be achieved if world agricultural productivity does not increase by 28 percent, “three times more than it grew in the last decade.
Read also: Hunger crisis could swell already record global displacement
The FAO points out that harvests would have to double to reach 24 percent, while animal meat production would have to grow by 31 percent, while sustainability measures are followed so that greenhouse gas emissions do not continue to rise, achieving in parallel the UN target to reduce these emissions.
“Achieving both targets in less than ten years through productivity improvements alone would be very difficult, suggesting that there are other measures that need to be taken in parallel,” the report reads.
Among the proposals are to enact direct gas emissions mitigation policies, implement new technologies to transform and make agri-food systems more resilient, enforce stricter measures against food waste, and limit excessive protein consumption in higher income countries.
Read also: “Hunger pandemic” will be bigger and more serious than covid-19
“More efforts are needed for the agricultural sector to effectively contribute to the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. This includes the large-scale adoption of climate-smart production processes and technologies, especially in the livestock sector,” indicates the report, which points to this sector as the main responsible for these emissions, which will increase by 8.8 percent by 2031.
