FAO at the Arab Regional Forum on Sustainable Development 2025: Goal 3 – Good health and wellbeing

Sarina Abdysheva, FAO Office of Sustainable Development Goals, delivered an statement at the Arab Regional Forum on Sustainable Development 2025 review session on ''Goal 3 – Good health and wellbeing".

 

Advancing SDG 3 through the One Health Approach: Achieving SDG 3—ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all—requires a comprehensive and integrated strategy that acknowledges the interdependence of human, animal, plant, and environmental health.


Food safety is critical for health and well-being: Ensuring food safety helps prevent foodborne illnesses, reduces deaths and illnesses from hazardous chemicals, and combats water-borne diseases, directly impacting several targets under SDG 3.


Transforming agrifood systems so that they become more sustainable, efficient, resilient, and inclusive enhances their capacity to produce safe food. It balances economic, social and environmental outcomes and guarantees that safe food reaches consumers.


Enabling the consumption of healthy diets: Three of the top 15 risk factors for early death in 2021 were high sodium intake, low fruit intake, and low whole grain intake. Enabling the consumption of healthy diets is crucial for reducing the risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases. 


FAO supports the implementation of integrated pest management (IPM) practices, which minimize the use of highly hazardous chemical pesticides, and the reduction of antimicrobial resistance development, which has negative impacts on human health. 


Environmental pollution causes more than 9 million deaths each year globally but there are no accurate national or global estimates of the burden of foodborne diseases originating from water and soil pollution in agriculture, and their negative impact on human health may be greatly underestimated.


Soil and water pollution and related foodborne diseases should be monitored to accurately assess target 3.9 “By 2030, significantly reduce the number of deaths and illnesses caused by hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution”, which currently lacks measurable indicators for water and soil pollution in agriculture.