UN News (Feb. 17): " Unless major changes are made – including the way food is produced, handled and disposed of around the world – last year’s food crisis which plunged millions back into hunger may foreshadow an even bigger crisis in the years to come, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a new report. The Environmental Food Crisis: The environment’s role in averting future food crises, released at the 25th session of the UNEP Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environment Forum in Nairobi, outlines a plan to reduce the risk of hunger and rising food insecurity for this century. Among the key points in its plan, the report suggested that recycling food wastes and deploying new technologies, aimed at producing biofuels, to produce sugars from discards such as straw and nutshells could be a key environmentally-friendly alternative to increased use of cereals for livestock.
The amount of unwanted fish currently discarded at sea – estimated at 30 million tons a year – could alone sustain more than a 50 per cent increase in fish farming, a rise needed to maintain per capita fish consumption at current levels by 2050 without increasing pressure on an already stressed marine environment. The report highlights a number of other measures, including the reorganization of food market infrastructure to regulate prices, a micro-financing fund to boost small-scale farming, the removal of agricultural subsidies, managing and better harvesting extreme rainfall and adopting more diversified and ecologically-friendly farming systems." Read more.
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