Marion Guillou

What Next for Agriculture After Durban

Despite obstacles in the UN climate talks, modest progress and opportunities for scientific input on agriculture arose. Global agriculture must produce more food to feed a growing population. Yet scientific assessments point to climate change as a growing threat to agricultural yields and food security (1–4). Recent droughts and floods in the Horn of Africa, Russia, Pakistan, and Australia affected food production and prices. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the frequency of such extreme weather events will increase (5), which, when combined with poverty, weak governance, conflict, and poor market access, can result in hunger and famine. At the same time, agriculture exacerbates climate change when greenhouse gases (GHGs) are released by land clearing, inappropriate fertilizer use, and other practices (6).

The role for scientists in tackling food insecurity and climate change

To adapt to climate change and ensure food security, major interventions are required to transform current patterns and practices of food production, distribution and consumption. The scientific community has an essential role to play in informing concurrent, strategic investments to establish climate-resilient agricultural production systems, minimize greenhouse gas emissions, make efficient use of resources, develop low-waste supply chains, ensure adequate nutrition, encourage healthy eating choices and develop a global knowledge system for sustainability. This paper outlines scientific contributions that will be essential to the seven policy recommendations for achieving food security in the context of climate change put forward by the Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. These include improved understanding of agriculture’s vulnerability to climate change, food price dynamics, food waste and consumption patterns and monitoring technologies as well as multidisciplinary investigation of regionally appropriate responses to climate change and food security challenges.

Eating patterns and food systems: critical knowledge requirements for policy design and implementation

Eating patterns are important for building sustainable food and agricultural systems. This paper begins by presenting the main features of eating patterns worldwide. These eating patterns include the relative convergence of diets, more rapid food transition in emerging and developing countries, development of a more complex food chain, and substantial food losses and waste at distribution and final consumption stages. These patterns have negative consequences on health and the environment. The drivers of these patterns are examined to identify knowledge gaps, the filling of which should facilitate the design and implementation of actions and policies aimed at making food systems more sustainable.

Managing Ecosystem Services

Nature provides men and women with—or makes it possible for them to produce—essential goods and services. These goods are not just the result of simple extraction, as with fossil fuels, but rather are the result of numerous ecological processes that depend on characteristics of the environment that are sensitive to human activities. Nature supplies the foundation and walls that hold up the history and organisation of our societies. Since the UN’s launch of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in 2001, the issue of goods and services provided by nature has taken on increased importance. The concept is now known as “ecosystem services”, although the use of the word “services” can be somewhat misleading, because it also includes agricultural production.

Eat Well, Eat Better

For millions of years, man’s primary preoccupation was having food to eat. Today, eating is an act that goes far beyond fulfilling biological needs, touching upon the social, hedonistic, cultural and symbolic aspects of life. Malnutrition includes illnesses related to overeating, undereating, or dietary imbalances in terms of food quality. These imbalances, most often linked to lifestyle, are on the rise throughout the world. Eating habits depend on much more than just individual preferences or consumer purchasing power, as was pointed out in the collective scientific expert report on eating habits coordinated by INRA in 2010. They are a determining factor not only for personal health but also for the diversity of the world’s food systems.

Reducing Losses and Waste at Consumption, Distribution and Processing Levels

The sustainable scenario put forth by the foresight study Agrimonde (Agrimonde 1 scenario) is based on the bold assumption that all countries in the world will have a food availability of 3,000 kcal per day per person by 2050—a ration the FAO deems sufficient. This presupposes an increase in developing countries, notably sub-Saharan Africa where daily food availability currently stands below 2,500 kcal, and a decrease in developed countries where it stands at about 4,000 kcal per day. Does this mean that the Agrimonde scenario calls for voluntary cutbacks in the richest nations? Not necessarily. First of all, let us recall that food availability and actual consumption are not the same thing. Food availability refers to the quantity of food available for the entire population of a country, not the quantity of food that is actually consumed.

Feeding the World Starts with Fighting Poverty

The riots that erupted in several world capitals when international food prices surged in 2007–2008 brought the issue of hunger to the fore once again, making it a top priority for the international community. Shortly after these riots, numerous declarations and propositions insisted on the need to bolster agricultural production. However, these food riots and the public debate it spurred only provide a partial view of the problem of hunger and food security. This chapter aims to provide a more detailed analysis of hunger, by outlining the issue and providing an overview of its causes and related factors. As with other chapters, it closes with possible courses of action to chart.

Towards a Global Governance of Food

The importance of food security and nutrition security will continue to grow in the future. These issues, which are a potential source of conflict, will constitute an essential parameter of security itself, whether it is within a country or on a planetary scale. On a more fundamental level, the tragedy of hunger, which affects a large portion of humanity, and the injustice of their inability to access healthy, varied and balanced food, are both tied to fundamental human rights. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and all the international legal instruments that have come after it over the decades, remind us that the rights linked to human dignity are fundamental values, including the right to feed oneself.

The Need to Strive for Productive Yet Ecological Agriculture

In the mid-twentieth century, the first “green revolution” led to historic growth in agricultural production. It enabled the global population to multiply by 2.4, average food consumption to increase and the proportion of undernourished people in the world to decrease. These achievements were made possible through increased productivity or yields of arable land, with 85 % of productivity increases attributed to increased yields and 15 % to the expansion of cultivated areas. What we call the “intensification” of agriculture enabled production to increase without a massive disruption of natural ecosystems and the often disastrous impacts this has on the environment.

Reducing Post-harvest Losses in Developing Nations

In developing countries, food losses occur primarily upstream of industrial food processing and sales and marketing, between the farm and commercial processors or distributors. These “post-harvest” losses are generally kept to a minimum in developed countries and the relatively high-tech agricultural systems of emerging economies. Nevertheless, they cover a wide range of extremely diverse situations linked to type of agriculture, climate, degree of sophistication and organisation of agri-food processing systems, and of course to the crops produced. This diversity makes quantifying losses and understanding their multiple causes difficult and a one-size-fits-all solution will therefore not do. The organisation of food systems in many developing countries is evolving rapidly under the influence, notably, of increasingly urban lifestyles based on western models: markets and small-scale retailers selling local products are losing ground to large retail chains on the outskirts of cities with increasingly diverse suppliers including at international level. Simultaneously, there is a growing trend in eating outside of the home in urban settings (snack bars, cafeterias and “maquis”—informal, makeshift eating establishments popular in Africa that also serve as a forum for exchange, a place for people to meet, etc.).