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 Later this month, world leaders are set to endorse a U.N. goal to
eliminate hunger by 2030, but they will have to convince their
citizens to adopt new eating habits first, experts say.
Diets must feature less red meat, which consumes 11 times more water
and results in five times more climate-warming emissions than
chicken or pork, according to a 2014 study.
The shift, like the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
themselves, must apply to both wealthy and developing nations, where
consumption of ecologically unfriendly foods is growing fastest.
"Sustainable and healthy diets will require a move towards a mostly
plant-based diet," said Colin Khoury, a biologist at the
Colombia-based International Centre for Tropical Agriculture.
Other key changes needed are cutting food waste and combating poor
nutrition, he added.
There are some signs the public is starting to take such advice on
board. They include the release of an "EatBy" app that reminds
consumers to use up food in the fridge, and a new social network to
help people adopt a "climatarian" diet that shuns meat from gassy
grazing animals, such as beef and lamb.
More than 1 million people have also signed an online petition
calling on European ministers to pass laws and launch national
action plans aimed at meeting a target in the SDGs to halve global
food waste per capita by 2030.
ZERO HUNGER POSSIBLE
Achieving the SDGs means the international community will need to
find enough food over the next 15 years for the 795 million people
who go to bed hungry every night.
"I don't think it's all that ambitious to eliminate hunger," said
Jomo Sundaram, assistant director-general of the U.N.'s Food and
Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
That is because incomes are rising in much of the world, transport
to move food is improving, and new technologies are keeping yields
of many key crops on an upward trend, he said.
The previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), adopted in 2000,
aimed to halve the proportion of hungry people worldwide, a target
that was largely achieved.
U.N. officials believe that success can now be extended to put an
end to hunger, which is judged according to the number of calories
people consume - a system some experts say is too narrow.
Despite a rapidly rising world population, there are 216 million
fewer hungry people on earth today than in 1990, the FAO reported in
May.
But with the global population expected to climb to 8.5 billion by
2030, from 7.3 billion now, and climate change predicted to ravage
yields in some nations, ending hunger will require tough choices in
the field and on the dinner table.
"It's not going to be easy, but if you look at the arithmetic, it is
achievable," Sundaram said.
WASTED OPPORTUNITIES
The world already produces enough food for everyone, but around one
third of it is discarded or spoils in transport or storage before
reaching consumers, according to the FAO.
In rich countries, individuals and grocery stores are responsible
for most of the waste when they throw away imperfect vegetables or
products they think are no longer safe to eat.
Developing countries lose roughly a third of their edibles due to
poor refrigeration systems and infrastructure bottlenecks, which
prevent food from reaching the market.
"Today we could easily feed everyone – it's a distribution issue,"
said Michael Obersteiner of the International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis, an Austria-based thinktank.
Meeting the hunger goal by 2030 may be possible if funding were
available to cut waste along the supply chain, and yields continued
to climb, he said.
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But by 2050, climate and population pressures - alongside an
expanding global middle-class with an appetite for meat - will make
it harder to keep up the momentum on zero hunger.
"Diets will have to change," Obersteiner said.
CHANGING CLIMATE, SHIFTING DIETS
Today half the world's agricultural land is used for livestock
farming, he said, which is far less efficient for feeding people –
and worse for the environment – than producing grain, fruit and
vegetables for direct human consumption.
And as middle-income earners in developing nations rapidly boost
their meat consumption, pressure is growing on farmland, forests and
water supplies, Obersteiner said.
Switching from eating meat four times a week, as recommended by the
UK-based Food Climate Research Network in 2008, to just once would
reduce commodity prices, as less grain would go to feed animals,
making food cheaper for the urban poor, he said.
It would also curb greenhouse emissions from the livestock sector,
which account for roughly 14 percent of the global total, more than
direct emissions from transport, according to a Chatham House paper
published in December.
But with around 1.5 degrees Celsius of global temperature rise
already locked in, some regions will have to change what they grow
as the climate warms, bringing more extreme weather.
"A lot of people in south and east Africa will have to move away
from maize, which is the main staple at the moment," said Luigi
Guarino, senior scientist with the Global Crop Diversity Trust, a
plant research organization.
Lower yields for a key food source in a region where one in four
still do not get enough to eat could spell disaster.
But farmers should be able to maintain or even increase production
in the face of climate change if they switch to sorghum, millet and
traditional vegetables like African nightshade or spider plant,
Guarino said.
In addition, new "climate-smart" varieties of maize and other staple
crops, bred to withstand hotter, drier weather, will be crucial for
meeting the SDGs, he added.
Some scientists have also been developing food crops with extra
micro-nutrients - such as orange sweet potatoes containing high
levels of vitamin A - to tackle malnutrition.
Large gene banks, used to breed crops containing the best traits
adapted to particular environments, together with public education
to shift diets to new and more diverse foods suited to a warmer
world, will be crucial, the scientist noted.
"There is no silver bullet to reaching the goal (of eliminating
hunger)," Guarino said. "But even if we get 80 percent there, it's
well worth it."
(Reporting by Chris Arsenault; editing by Megan Rowling; Please
credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson
Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights, trafficking,
corruption and climate change. Visit www.trust.org)
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