Date: 31/08/2022

Relevance: GS-3: Major crops-cropping patterns in various parts of the country, food security.

Key Phrases: Climate-resilient food systems, Food security, Food-borne diseases, World Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization, Undernourishment, Shrinking Food Basket, Famine tendencies, Avaclim project, Agro-ecology, Antimicrobial resistance.

Why in News?

• Global food security is increasingly under threat. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated how vulnerable our food supply chains are. In the medium term, however, a changing climate, together with dramatic biodiversity loss, is a much bigger challenge.

Climate change and Food security:

• Climate change expressively alters biodiversity, agricultural production, and food security in many ways.
• Among them, shifts in soil quality, precipitation, pest regimes, seasonal growth patterns, along with land degradation and reduction in biodiversity—have impacted agricultural and aquatic food production systems across the world.
• The World Health Organization (WHO) has found that every year, nearly 600 million people (7.5% of the global population) fall ill from eating contaminated food and 420,000 die because of it.
• Children under five bear 40% of the food-borne disease burden.
• Almost one-third of the world’s population did not have access to adequate food in 2020; three billion could not get healthy food.
• The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has found that around 720-811 million face hunger. Undernourishment rates among children have also been rising alarmingly.

Climate change impact on Food Security:

• Shrinking Food Basket:
  • Climate change impacts the whole supply chain from production to consumption. It destroys land and crops, kills livestock, depletes fisheries, and cuts off transport to markets. This impacts food production, availability, diversity, access, and safety.
• Increasing Hunger:
  • United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) shows that a 2°C rise in average global temperature from pre-industrial levels will see a staggering 189 million additional people in the grip of hunger.
• Increasing Vulnerability:
  • Majority of communities, that rely on subsistence agriculture, fishing, and livestock, have to bear the impacts of climate change with limited means to adapt.
• Increasing Famine tendencies:
  • Across the world, up to 811 million people do not have enough food and as per the recent WFP estimates, 41 million people in 43 countries are at risk of sliding into famine.
• Increasing Hidden Hunger:
  • Latest IPCC report asserted climate change threatens nutritional food availability because both crop yield and crop nutritional composition are declining.

Strategies for climate-resilient food systems:

• Tolerant breeds in livestock and poultry:
  • Indigenous breeds have unique characteristics that are adapted to very specific eco-systems across the world.
  • These unique characteristics are resistant to droughts, thermoregulation, ability to walk long distances, fertility and mothering instincts, ability to ingest and digest low-quality feed, and resistance to diseases.
  • These livestock breeds may not be highly productive in terms of meat or milk production, but are highly adaptive to the unpredictable nature and have low resource footprints.
• Water management:
  • Water-smart technologies like a furrow-irrigated raised bed, micro-irrigation, rainwater harvesting structure, cover-crop method, laser land levelling, reuse wastewater, deficit irrigation and drainage management can support farmers to decrease the effect of variations of climate.
  • Various technologies based on the things given below may help farmers to reach satisfactory crop yields, even in deficit rainfall and warmer years:
    • Precision estimation of crop water needs;
    • Groundwater recharge techniques;
    • Adoption of scientific water conservation methods;
    • Altering the fertilizer and irrigation schedules;
    • Cultivating less water requiring varieties;
    • Adjusting the planting dates;
    • Irrigation scheduling;
    • Adopting zero-tillage.
• Agro-advisory:
  • Response farming is an integrative approach. It could be called farming with advisories taken from the technocrats depending on local weather information.
  • The success of response farming, viz., decreased danger and enhanced productivity has already been taken in Tamil Nadu and many other states in India.
• Soil organic carbon:
  • Different farm management practices can increase soil carbon stocks and stimulate soil functional stability.
  • Conservation agriculture technologies (reduced tillage, crop rotations, and cover crops), soil conservation practices (contour farming) and nutrient recharge strategies can refill soil organic matter by giving a protective soil cover.

Agroecology as a tool for climate resilience farming:

• Agro-ecology enables the improvement of agricultural production through the enhancement of local natural resources.
• It contributes to maintaining biodiversity and restoring land in dry lands in generally poor regions, where physical constraints are significant. They are particularly threatened by global warming and food insecurity.
• A recent study by FAO, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture and Biovision revealed the strong correlation between the concept of resilience and agro-ecology, emphasizing three cornerstone aspects of agro-ecology’s resilience-enhancing potential:
  • Diversity creates synergies and redundancies to minimize shocks and reduce complete failures — including species and varietal diversity of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes up to diversity of landscapes, farming practices, and economic diversification.
  • Healthy and fertile soils are fostered through agro-ecological practices, e.g. by nurturing soil biodiversity, closing nutrient cycles, and reducing the input of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.
  • Local farmers and their communities with their knowledge of the terrain, traditions, and heritage, blended with cutting edge scientific knowledge, can bolster resilience.

Way forward:

• The concurrent problems of hunger, ill health linked to diet, food insecurity, threats from new diseases, and antimicrobial resistance are simultaneously rising among people living in poverty in several developing countries.These problems are made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic.
• We must champion research that addresses planet, human, and animal health alongside environmental, societal, and economic drivers that improve productivity and sustainability, reduce losses and waste, and reduce zoonotic and pandemic threats.

Source: ORF-Online 

Mains Question:

Q. What are the present challenges before food security in world? How can Agro-ecology provide a solution to food insecurity? (250 words).