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Ensuring Food Security While Safeguarding the Environment

Tropentag 2010 - Keynote Lectures Tuesday Challenges in feeding the world is not only an issue of production but also an issue of demand, said Christian Nellemann from the United Nations Environment Programme GRID Arendal today at the Tropentag Conference in Zürich. He stated later on that while agriculture surely has impacts on the environment, but more important to understand is how the environment provides the platform for food production. Land degradation and loss of ecosystems services will cost 5-25% of food production by 2050. Some of the causes are considered to derive from uses of pesticides, nitrogen, and phosphate fertilizers which have increased since 1961-1999. Furthermore, the irrigated land today has doubled. Water is also a huge deal of an issue. From the water that we consumed, 75% of it goes to food production. More interesting to realize is that wastewater pollution from ineffective irrigation systems require more water and result in greater run-off, in which we loose 50-70% of N and P. Rice as an important means of food in Asia is in threat as a result of drought, low stocks, biofuels, high oil prices and price volatility is likely to increase in the future. Meanwhile we need to feed a projected additional 2.7 billion people in 40 years. And for meat consumption itself, which was projected of 37.4 kg/ person/ year in 2000 is showing an increase by year 2050 to 52 kg/ person/ year. Four solutions are then offered by Christian Nellemann, which are: (1) boost small-scale farmer productivity through a global fund for micro-finance of eco-agriculture, (2) restore degraded lands, (3) increase market access and marketing cooperatives, and (4) reduce post harvest losses, waste and find alternatives to cereals in animal feed. As a final remark, Christian Nellemann stressed out the point that today’s issues shouldn’t only be about increasing the productivity, but that securing our only environment should have an equal amount of effort.

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