SDGs: End Hunger, Food Security and Nutrition and Achieve Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable Development Goals

This year, the United Nations is moving from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to a new set of global goals for (sustainable) development, setting the framework agenda for the period till 2030.

The new global agenda that recognizes the historic agenda for global sustainable development is to replace the MDGs which expire this year.

There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of these; about seven has a direct or indirect relation to food availability, sustainable practices that increase food production and environmental protection and improvement of nutrition.

Ghana needs to be in a good position (Human Resource Capacity, Policy, and Infrastructure) to aid the implementation and achievement these Goals.

The hunger/poverty cycle is a difficult one to break, but that is necessary if we want to live in a world where everyone has the ability to fulfill their potential. Did you know there are over 870 million people who are hungry in the world at this exact moment? The kind of hunger that stops a body being able to work the hours that it needs to, that stops a brain being able to concentrate in class, that stops a person living in poverty being able to lift themselves out of it. This goal will not only make sure everyone has enough food, but that we can make sure it is nutritious and sustainable to grow.

End Hunger, Food Security and Nutrition and Achieve Sustainable Agriculture

On the cluster of food security, nutrition, land degradation, desertification and drought, a strong SDG on food security and agriculture is seen as key to poverty eradication and sustainable development.

Major Groups and other stakeholders stress that the whole food chain matters to food security as well as to sustainability; each link must be geared to meeting people’s needs for affordable, nutritious food in ways that are environmentally sound. This requires consideration of the full food life cycle, including minimization of pre- and post-harvest losses and food waste.

Among the challenges in defining the food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture agenda are key relationships, interdependencies and possible tensions, between, e.g. consumption and production, where what and how farmers produce is conditioned by consumers’ food preferences; the more wastefully people consume, the more food needs to be produced, straining land, water and ecosystem resources. They also point to the responsibilities of agribusiness to communities and to the protection of the natural resource base on which they depend. There is the need for the establishment of a legally binding framework for corporate social and environmental responsibility.

Providing support to small-holder agriculture and livestock herding, as well as small-scale fishers, including through farmer-centred, knowledge-based support programmes (Farmer Based Organisations). The need for increased investment in agriculture as emphasized, including both public and private investment in agricultural R&D, and the rebuilding of state-provided agricultural services like extension that have atrophied or been dismantled. It is also important to note that women’s central role in agricultural production as well as in household nutrition needs to be reflected in relevant targets and indicators. Especially important is to secure women’s (and also indigenous peoples’) right to land and security of tenure.

Among concrete targets proposed under a food security, nutrition and sustainable agricultural Sustainable Development Goals are: universal access to nutritious food; toxin-free, GMO-free food for all; halving the rate of conversion of forests and other ecosystems to agricultural use; phasing out harmful subsidies; increasing agriculture’s share of ODA, focusing on smallholders; reducing food waste; increasing soil carbon stocks; and improving water efficiency in agriculture.

"the best culture is agriculture"

Akwasi A. Tagoe