Global food security can be achieved for almost 1 billion chronically undernourished people by promoting strong political leadership, technological innovation, investment in smallholder farmers and efficient markets, according to a new book.
In “One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?”, author Gordon Conway, a professor of international development and director of advocacy group Agriculture for Impact at Imperial College London, emphasises the importance of reducing hunger and poverty by increasing food production within an environmentally sustainable framework, which recognises climate change as a serious hindrance to future food security.
“Food price spikes, malnutrition and population growth, high costs of fertilizers and oil, degradation of land and water, and most importantly climate change must all be addressed,” Conway said at the launch of the book in London on Tuesday, where he said that policymakers need to tackle more than 20 issues to help solve the hunger problem.
“We know what’s going to happen more or less,” he said.
“Growing seasons are going to shorten in much of Africa, rising temperatures are going to decrease yields, and in addition to that we are going to get more intense and frequent extreme events,” Conway added, citing the impact of drought in Africa, North America and Russia over the past few years.
A key part of Conway’s proposal for achieving food security includes improving maternal and child nutrition in developing countries where 98 percent of the world’s hungry live. Smallholder farmers make up 70 percent of people who are chronically hungry, 43 percent of all farmers worldwide are women, and 38 percent of working youth in Africa are employed in agriculture.
