We can’t really talk about the planet’s most pressing environmental problems without talking about food systems. And by food systems, we also mean the agriculture that it takes to support them: farming, fisheries, forestry and the value chains that provide food and fiber for our daily lives.
Agriculture uses 70 percent of all fresh water withdrawal and contributes nearly 30 percent (including off-farm) of global greenhouse gas emissions. Food production is also responsible for 75 percent of agrobiodiversity loss. This is already true now and by 2050, the world will need 50 percent more food to feed a population of over 9.7 billion, a population which will be more urbanized, affluent and demanding in its food choices. Our natural resources are already under pressure. Yet, 815 million people are hungry, and 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies.
It is clear that food production and agriculture need to be a large part of the discussion in realizing the world’s main objectives for the future, i.e. the Sustainable Development Goals. Recognizing this, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and FAO, as an implementing agency, address the critical nexus of agriculture and the environment. Through 187 projects in over 120 countries, FAO-GEF projects have tackled issues like climate change, biodiversity, land degradation, safe disposal of hazardous chemicals and management of international waters. Traditionally, FAO and the GEF have worked together to help smallholder producers improve production practices in ways that also generate global environmental results, but the partnership is increasingly focusing on the entire value chain.
Here are just three of the FAO-GEF projects that are helping to tackle environmental challenges through the lens of agriculture:
1. Helping our food producers adapt to climate change
Rural people produce three-quarters of the world's food yet these same people constitute 80 percent of the global poor. Most do not have the means to change their farming practices on their own. One of the biggest areas of work for FAO and GEF is helping farmers to cope with the changes in climate and become resilient to them.
Worldwide, rainfall is increasingly less predictable and storms and natural disasters are more frequent. Temperatures aren’t stable and seasons don’t come when they are supposed to. In Mali, these realities are extreme. As a country whose rainfall has never been reliable, Mali has also been increasingly prone to drought in the last 50 years. Continued trends of increased temperatures and decreased rainfall could be devastating to Mali’s major food crops, such as millet, sorghum, rice and maize, not to mention, problematic for livestock, the country’s second most important export commodity.
A GEF-funded project focused on helping over 40 000 smallholder farmers to diversify production, improve soil health and fertility and choose seeds and varieties more tolerant to varied temperature and rainfall. These actions have helped increase yields by 21 to 77 percent for sorghum, millet, rice, corn, sesame and cotton.
