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Sustainable
Consumption: G lobal hunger has reduced to 805 million undernourished people in 2012–14, which is down more than 100 million over the last decade and 209 million lower than in 1990–921. The decrease is substantial but ensuring food security for all the people of the world is still a challenge with there being many who suffer from chronic or transitory food insecurity, especially in the developing and least developed countries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, about 1.3 billion tonnes per year or one-third of the edible food produced for human consumption is wasted along the food supply chain. While developed countries are responsible for humongous food waste in their lifestyle habits, developing and least developed countries lack proper infrastructure and resources resulting in leakages and food loss.The UNEP-Development Alternatives project on ‘Policy Analysis of Natural Resource Issues on SDGs’ has identified interesting linkages among various policy scenarios of efficient natural resource management. The study shows that ambitious environmental SDGs are attainable and tradeoffs manageable only if sustainable consumption and production policies are integrated as necessary conditions for broad SDG implementation. One of the case stands that dietary policy-shift will not just support in nourishing the growing population but shall also prevent the inefficient expenditure of finite resources. This article elaborates on the impact that dietary shifts can have on the overall food security and efficient natural resource use. A major challenge to food security comes from its conflict with desired environmental outcomes. Restricted land use change, on one hand, mitigates destruction of natural forests and GHG emissions and increases ground water for agriculture. However, it causes increase in food prices and decreases food availability among vulnerable population due to limited land available for agriculture and thus restricting the overall crop production. Restricted land use change, evidently supports natural resource management but raises challenges to food security. This general tension between environmental conservation initiatives and food security presents a major obstacle to the pursuit of multiple SDGs and must be central to any strategy for SDG implementation. For the system to achieve desirable environmental
outcomes as well as ensure food security, land is the competing resource
between the two aims. At present, it looks like a trade off where either
of the two shall supersede the other. It is also to be noticed that any
alternative action that depressurises the system and thus increases the
net availability of land, water and food shall generate positive
outcomes to both -environmental systems and food security. Meat demand growth, especially in affluent and emerging countries puts immense pressure on the land resource and thus proves to be environmentally costly. Meat production is a land intensive activity, thus pressurises the land system due to grazing and other poultry needs in the production mechanism. A shift to a vegetarian diet and an adequate change in the lifestyle of meat consumers of the world substantially would relieve land for other purposes, depressurising the natural systems on the whole. Such a shift in the consumption pattern towards a more sustainable consumption has the potential to bring synergies in the goal of food security and environmental well-being. If ambitiously formulated and rigorously implemented, this can lead towards the achievement of longer term goals as formulated in the Rio convention. Beyond land, water and feed implications, excess consumption of animal calories is associated with negative health outcomes such as obesity and other health problems in the developed countries 2. At the same time, increased production and subsequent consumption of more food would support in alleviating malnutrition in the developing world. Thus, in addition to the significant land system depressurisation potential, sustainable consumption, specifically dietary shifts would remove obstacles to several developmental SDGs, especially the ones that require extensive resource use. qAnshul S Bhamra Endnotes 2 Eisler, M. C. et al. Agriculture: Steps to sustainable livestock. Nature 507,32 (2014) |
