Your mother’s stern reminder at the dinner table may be off the mark. “Finish your food. Millions are going hungry,” may not be entirely true. “Almost a billion” is more like it.
Estimates from the Oxfam publication, “Growing a Better Future (Food justice in a resource-constrained world),” show that the world needs 70 percent more food by 2050, when the population hits 9 billion.
How to hit this target? Oxfam has two major suggestions:
1. Prioritize the needs of food producers, most of them women. Increase investments in extension services, technical support, credit facilities and other production-enhancing measures to help marginalized fishers and small-scale farmers.
2. Develop national strategies to tackle hunger and vulnerability through a combination of climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and social protection. A fair, ambitious and legally binding accord on climate change is a critical step towards achieving a world that will produce enough for everybody for all time.
The rest of us can make a difference as well, as Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala, Oxfam-UK CEO Dame Barbara Stocking, Sen. Francisco Pangilinan, and several women farmers suggested. A few things we can do:
Learn to eat rice with extenders like root crops and bananas
Go organic; pesticides and chemical fertilizers strip the earth of its nutrients
Support small-scale farms
Buy local and cut down on the consumption of imported food items
Offer scholarships for agriculture-related courses
Demand incentives for small-scale farmers in the form of credit, training, irrigation facilities and regulated ownership of agri-business like fishpens
Develop better access to markets to do away with middlemen and obtain better prices for small-scale farmers
Review laws and regulations on agri resources (i.e. fish cages) to favor the communities hosting them
Offer socialized credit
Restore government subsidy for rice farmers
Offer access to seeds that can adopt to climate change conditions
As Oxfam puts it, “The decisions we take, and the choices we make, matter.”