Food security

This publication is based on studies carried out from August 2010 to January 2011 by The Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK) on request from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The two studies on global food losses (one for high/medium-income countries and one for low income countries) have been carried out to serve as a basis for the international congress Save Food!, 16-17 May 2011, at the international packaging industry fair Interpack2011 in Düsseldorf, Germany. Save Food! has been co-organized by Interpack2011 and FAO. Save Food!

This book describes how an era of biohappiness, based on the conservation and sustainable and equitable use of biodiversity, can be launched. It deals with all aspects of conservation such as in situ, ex situ and community conservation, and also covers conservation issues relating to mangroves and other coastal bioresources, whose importance has grown with the emerging possibility of sea-level rise from global warming.

Can agricultural water management (AWM) technologies provide innovative solutions that can help to meet this challenge of feeding a growing, mostly disadvantaged, population by producing more food but with fewer resources? This paper reviews the water-food-poverty nexus and examines the role that AWM technologies may play in achieving world food and water security.

For a large number of developing countries, agriculture remains the single most important sector. Climate change has the potential to damage irreversibly the natural resource base on which agriculture depends, with grave consequences for food security. However, agriculture is the sector that has the potential to transcend from being a problem to becoming an essential part of the solution to climate change provided there is a more holistic vision of food security, agricultural mitigation, climate-change adaptation and agriculture’s pro-poor development contribution.

The concept of Integrated Food and Energy Systems (IFES) as such is not new. Simple integration of food and energy production at both small and large scales has shown many successful results. However, with the increasing complexity of the system, - and hence higher resource use efficiency, the number of successful cases diminishes. Concrete results on wide-scale implementation of more complex IFES are scarce.

Part 1 of this final report outlines current global environmental problems and serves as an introduction to the entire report. Part 2 gives the results of the Conference discussions. Chapter 1 summarizes the data and reference materials that were submitted to the Conference, and demonstrates how serious current environmental problems are by giving actual data on global warming, loss of biodiversity and others. Chapters 2 and 3 summarize the results of the discussions.