FAO Initiates Plan to End Malnutrition

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations has embarked on the creation of a groundbreaking global roadmap to eradicate all forms of malnutrition .

This initiative will undergo extensive refinement and elaboration over the next three years. COP29 will delve into regional adaptation and financial options, while COP30 will outline concrete investment and policy packages at the country level.

The Paris Agreement, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, aims to limit the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C. The roadmap outlines 120 actions and key milestones within 10 domains, focusing on clean energy, crops, fisheries and aquaculture, food loss and waste, forests and wetlands, healthy diets, livestock, soil and water, and data and inclusive policies.

Amid projections of 600 million people facing chronic hunger by 2030 and an escalating global climate crisis, the roadmap calls for a transformative shift in agrifood systems. It challenges the narrative linking increased production to higher emissions and environmental degradation, emphasizing the opportunity to enhance production efficiency while aligning with climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience objectives.

The roadmap aims to reduce agrifood systems’ methane emissions by 25% by 2030, achieve carbon neutrality by 2035, and transform them into a carbon sink by 2050. It envisions eliminating chronic undernourishment by 2030, ensuring access to healthy diets for all by 2050, and halving per capita global food waste by 2030.

The roadmap underscores the symbiotic relationship between agrifood systems transformation and climate actions, urging the mobilization of climate finance for implementation. FAO Director-General QU Dongyu emphasized the importance of climate financing for agrifood systems’ transformation to achieve sustainable development.

_{Repurposed article originally published in Dawn}