How do you imagine your life 10 or 20 years from now? What if I told you that one day, there might not be enough food on your plate?
How do you imagine your life 10 or 20 years from now? What if I told you that one day, there might not be enough food on your plate?
It is no exaggeration. Today, around 800 million people go to bed hungry every night. By 2050, we will need to produce at least 50% more food to feed a population on track to reach nine billion.
That’s a daunting challenge for our food systems, our planet, and our generation.
Already, the way we are consuming our natural resources puts enormous pressure on the future of food. On land, more food produced means more water used to grow crops and raise livestock. In the ocean, it is estimated that over 90% of large fish have already been consumed in the past 50 years (learn more). We are also wasting up to one-third of the food we produce, which could have helped fill the hunger gap in developing countries. And climate change doesn’t help: Frequent droughts and floods are leaving many rural poor from Africa to South Asia without enough food on their dinner plates.
If we keep eating our planet, what will be left for our children and ourselves in the future? In other words, how will we nutritiously feed nine billion by 2050 in the face of environmental threats?
There may not be a silver bullet, but the great news is that our generation can help — and we can do it creatively.
As Akinwumi Adesina, Nigeria’s minister of agriculture, passionately states, youth are the “movers and shakers” who can unlock Africa’s potential of achieving shared prosperity . Every one of us can help innovate and transform the way we produce, source, and consume food for a greener future. For example, we can:
- Design an app to help local farmers grow healthier produce and sell it better, just like Agro Central, a web and SMS-based service in Jamaica that connects producers to the market, and informs them of crop diseases and weather events.
- Become an “agri-preneur” who produces popular, naturally sourced food. Get inspired by a Senegalese agribusiness that makes chemical-free juices from ginger, lemon and other produce grown by 150 local farmers, as well as one of my favorite agri-prenuers who turned waste into “niche” food products for export.
- Promote a more sustainable food culture in your community. Perhaps try to help a local restaurant market healthy dishes made from sustainably grown fruit and vegetables? In the Pacific state of Samoa, pride in traditional cuisine has been proven to boost the production and distribution of fresh produce grown in local soil.
Click here to read the original full article written by Andy Shuai Liu and published on World Bank blog.