8/3/2019 Critical Summary, Food and Farming

1/2

The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global

sustainability:

Exam No: B025211

The paper is about the pressures that the food system (FS) is facing currently

in a context of climate change, related to the production and the global

demand of food; and moreover, about identifying the issues on which the

policymakers have to take decisions urgently to reach the main goal of the FS:

ensure food for the global population, rising to almost 9 billion in 2050, based

on a sustainable and equitable way.

Its main statements to obtain this aim is that the FS needs a reappraisal,

recognizing its failures, like the extent of hunger and the effects of

unsustainable process of food production (loss of soil fertility, excessive

extraction of water, etc); and identifying the drivers of change affecting the

system, e.g. global population growth, demand, climate changes, competition

of resources, among others.

Therefore, substantial changes have to be made over all the components that

interact in this complex system, which can be summarized in 5 key challenges:

A. Balancing future demand and supply sustainably: improving productivity

using existing knowledge and encouraging new sustainable technology to

address future threats. In addition, the waste within producers and

consumers (30% of global food) must be controlled along with an

improvement in governance assuring a healthy competition of global actors.

B. Addressing the threat of future volatility in the FS: avoiding spikes in priceswhich could increase the uncertainties of future fluctuations and, therefore,

affect the economic and politic stability in some countries.

C. Ending hunger: as undernutrition means severe and long-lasting effects in

children and low-income countries. Therefore, it needs strong local and

international political actors whom take in charge of this issue. In addition,

agriculture must be encouraged where hunger is a problem to create access

to food, generate employment and empower excluded groups.

D. Meeting the challenges of a low emissions world: taking in account the

important contribution of FS in GHG emissions. Hence, food production mustbe considered in negotiations on emissions reductions and new practices

and policies in agriculture must be developed.

E. Maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services while feeding the world:

evaluating the services that ecosystems provide to the FS and internalizing

its effects.

8/3/2019 Critical Summary, Food and Farming

2/2

Despite there are priorities (key actions) to reach these challenges, one thing is

clear: the fulfillment of one measure is not enough to meet them. Hence

coordinated actions have to be taken over all this range of measures at the

same time.

Although this paper gives useful details about feeding the population expected

in 2050, it seems strange that this level of growth is assumed without any

questioning and any measure of population growth control is considered in the

paper. As some authors mentioned many years ago, the control of population

growth is necessary to avoid environmental impacts1 since this growth is

defined as the responsible of the most environmental problems2.

Finally, there is an absence of a diagram which shows the relations and

connections within the net of measures described in the paper. Its necessary

the definition of a rout map that helps policymakers to know the proper and

efficient sequence of measures to put in practice.

References:

1. Dowall D., (1980). An Examination Of Population-Growth-ManagingCommunities [on line]. Policies Studies Journal. Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 414-429.Available on: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1541-0072.1980.tb00950.x/full

2. Meffe G, Ehrlich A.& Ehrenfeld D. (1993). Editorial: Human PopulationControl: The Missing Agenda [on line]. Conservation Biology. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.1-3. Available on: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2386633

3. Foresight (2011). Final Project Report. The Future of Food and Farming:Challenges and choices for global sustainability. The Government Office of

Science, London. 211 pp.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psj.1980.9.issue-3/issuetochttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psj.1980.9.issue-3/issuetoc