Change is the word that represents this second objective of the Sustainable Development Goals. According to the United Nations, a profound reform of the global agricultural and food system is needed if we are to feed the 815 million hungry people currently living on the planet and the two billion additional people who will be living there by 2050.
The agricultural and food sectors contribute enormously and are vital to eliminating hunger and poverty. The handicap lies in the fact that, due to current overexploitation, our soils, oceans, forests, drinking water, and biodiversity are rapidly degrading.
Vendor in the New Kru Town neighborhood of Monrovia.
Climate change also impacts this goal by increasing the risks associated with natural disasters (droughts or floods), and a large portion of the population living in rural areas is forced to migrate to cities because they cannot earn a living on the land they work.
We're detailing some of the figures used so far on the United Nations website to clarify the numbers:
- 1 in 9 people in the world is malnourished, that's 815 million people.
- Asia is the continent with the most people suffering from hunger, 67%.
- 1 in 4 children in the world suffers from stunted growth.
- Agriculture provides livelihoods for 40% of the world's population.
Girl in the New Kru Town neighborhood where there are high poverty rates
The goals proposed by 2030:
- End hunger and ensure access by all people, in particular the poor and people in vulnerable situations, including infants, to safe, nutritious and sufficient food all year round
- End all forms of malnutrition, including achieving, by 2025, the internationally agreed targets on stunting and weight loss in children under 5 years of age, and addressing the nutritional needs of adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women, and older persons
- Ensure the sustainability of food production systems and implement resilient agricultural practices that increase productivity and production, contribute to the maintenance of ecosystems, strengthen the capacity to adapt to climate change, extreme weather events, droughts, floods and other disasters, and progressively improve soil and land quality.
- Adopt measures to ensure the proper functioning of food commodity markets and their derivatives and facilitate timely access to market information, in particular on food stocks, in order to help limit extreme food price volatility.
Why is this Zero Hunger goal important? In this PDF You can download the answers. You'll see estimates of the number of people suffering from hunger, distributed by region, how much it will cost to achieve this goal, and, most importantly, what we can do to help.
Human settlement in Iquitos, Peru.
Fountain: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/es/hunger/
MarĂa Escolar Volunteer 2.0. from Juan Ciudad NGO.
