Half the sector’s population is directly engaged in agriculture, and almost 40% of the land is devoted to agriculture and farm animals. Food production sustains us all, but it also comes at a fee: water resources are being depleted and contaminated with the aid of metal manufacturing, and bad diets are burdening our healthcare structures.
Despite the large demanding situations faced with the aid of the agriculture region, food production also offers an outstanding possibility to understand the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Climate Agreement goals while stemming environmental degradation and biodiversity losses. But we want to trade the manner we feed ourselves. And we need to do it fast.
“By 2050, our planet will need to feed nearly 10 billion human beings. We must transform our agricultural and meal structures so they are painted with and not towards nature. This is the most effective way to ensure people everywhere have to get entry to a healthy and nutritious weight loss plan,” says Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme. In April 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, alongside different United Nations companions, including the UN Environment, launched a brand new initiative for tackling those troubles.
The Scaling Up Agroecology Initiative seeks to expose how diversified agroecological structures are critical, not most effective in addressing poverty, starvation, and climate exchange mitigation and version, additionally for at once realizing 12 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in areas which include health, schooling, gender, water, strength, and economic growth.
Agroecology uses ecological and social principles and concepts in agricultural production systems. There is not any single definition. However, it implies sustainable, integrated land management and entails diversification of the manufacturing system, consisting of agroforestry. It’s carefully linked to natural or low-outside-enter farming. Other terms, which include regenerative agriculture or eco-agriculture, also are used.
“Agroecology may be identified in the scientific literature for the reason that 1920s, and has located expression in the circle of relatives farmers’ practices, in grassroots social moves for sustainability and the general public regulations of numerous countries around the world,” says Emma Siliprandi, lead focal factor for the Scaling up Agroecology Initiative on the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Gaining momentum
In 2013, the Food and Agriculture Organization did not pay much attention to agroecology. But things have changed surprisingly because governments and farmers worldwide know that throwing growing quantities of insecticides and fertilizers at crops is no longer sustainable, possible, or, in the long term, worthwhile.
Agroecology is about mainstreaming biodiversity in agriculture and bridging the space among the producers of food and purchasers,” says Emile Frison, the former Director-General of Bioversity International, a leading proponent of agroecology, and a contemporary member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).
