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Food security as a strategic priority for commissioning and use of evidence
In the last of his series of articles for SD Scene, Professor Robert Watson, Chief Scientific Advisor for Defra, explains why food security is a strategic priority for the commissioning and use of evidence.
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Over the past century agricultural science and new technologies have boosted production with enormous gains in yields and reductions in the price of food, but the benefits have been unevenly distributed and environmental degradation has resulted in many parts of the world.
Agricultural productivity globally has increased by almost a factor of 3 in the last 50 years, but one billion people still go to bed hungry every night and hunger has increased in several parts of the world, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa. In addition, this increase in agricultural production has been accompanied by an increase in GHG emissions, loss of biodiversity, and land and water degradation. The underlying causes of hunger are more associated with poverty, institutional weaknesses and policy environments than an inability to produce enough food.
In the coming decades we need to double food availability in an environmentally and socially sustainable manner in order to alleviate hunger and under-nutrition. In addition, sustained growth in the agricultural sector is needed to reduce poverty, enhance rural livelihoods and stimulate economic growth in developing countries. While we could feed the world today with current technologies, further advances in agricultural science and technology are needed to meet future challenges. Agriculture can no longer be thought of as production alone, but the inescapable interconnectedness of agriculture’s different economic, social and environmental roles and functions must be explicitly recognised, i.e., agriculture is multifunctional. Without an appropriate enabling framework (i.e., rural development, access to markets, improved extension services, empowerment of women and trade reform), the potential of advances in agricultural science and technology will not be realised.
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In previously published articles Professor Watson considered climate change and biodiversity as strategic priorites. His paper on the three linked priorities is available to download: Strategic priorities for commissioning and use of evidence (pdf).
