Dear Colleagues,
Your Draft Report is a very interesting and in many cases a well balanced document.
Nevertheless, I allow me minor comments to some topics:
- Box 1 (p.10) sumarized 6 dimensions of food security. I miss food safety as dimension 7. Later „Food Safety“ is mentioned in the document (e.g. Figure 1). For my understanding – Food Safety is a very important parameter. There is no sense to have enough food, but it is unsafe. Therrefore, it should be a dimension in Box 1.
- p. 22 ff.: I miss some clear statements for the competition between food (men) and feed (animals) and (fuel). There exist some calcultions for the „Human edible fractions“ (hef; Wilkinson (2011) „Redefining efficiency of feed used by livestock“. Animal 5, 1014-1022; Ertl, P., Klocker, H., Hörtenhuber, S., Knaus, W., Zollitsch, W. (2015) The net contribution of dairy production to human food supply: The cause of Austrian dairy farms. Agriculture Systems 137, 119-125; ) in order to quantify the feed:food competition. Similar calculations are also possible with the Human edible protein (hep fraction).
- p. 25 ff.: The objectives of plant breeding (incl. green biotechnology and genome editing) should be more cleary formulated/defined. For my understanding, plant breeding is the starting point of the whole food chain. We need plants with important Input traits (e.g. biotic and abiotic stress tolerance, such as improved dry resistance, high water using efficiency, higher resistance against cold, heat, salt or salt water etc., more efficent use of N and CO2 from the air) and Output traits (higher content of nutrients, higher food safety) (see NASEM 2016; Nat. Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2016). Therefore „Plant breeding“ is the starting point and a corner stone for food security and nutrition in the future. It should be more underlined in the present HPLEdocument.
Many other aspects of food security in the future are mentioned (e.g. such as importance of smallholder farms, food losses and waste, hunger and obesity etc.), but I could not find some remarks to land grabbing in developing countries and consequences of cheap imports of low quality food (e.g. wings and heads of poultry, innerts animals of animal origin) from so-called developed countries into African and Asian countries and the significance/influence on the local agriculture and sustainable food security.
Best regards
Gerhard Flachowsky
Gerhard Flachowsky