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Monday, October 24, 2016

Experts say climate change may cause decline in nutrients

Experts have raised alarming over the global effects of climate change to food which may lead to loss of nutritional content of some foods, such as declining zinc, iron and protein counts in staple cereals, and trigger new health issues, including diarrhoea for humans and an array of transboundary animal diseases, reports NaijaAgroNet.

Experts at the Food and Agriculture Organisation, beyond 2030, scientific evidence has shown negative pressures on food production will be increasingly felt everywhere. Until then, adverse impacts of higher temperatures are sharply skewed towards developing countries, pointing to dimmer prospects for their food self-sufficiency.
They said that helping smallholders adapt to climate change risks is critical for global poverty reduction and food security.
Close attention, FAO experts said, should be paid to removing obstacles they may face and fostering an enabling environment for individual, joint and collective action.
Further, FAO urged policy makers to identify and remove such barriers, stressing that these obstacles can include input subsidies that promote unsustainable farming practices, poorly aligned incentives and inadequate access to markets, credit, extension services and social protection programmes, and often disadvantage women, who make up to 43 percent of the agricultural labour force.
The report stresses that more climate finance is needed to fund developing countries' actions on climate change.  International public finance for climate change adaptation and mitigation is growing and, while still relatively small, can act as a catalyst to leverage larger flows of public and private investments. More climate finance needs to flow to sustainable agriculture, fisheries and forestry to fund the large-scale transformation and the development of climate-smart food production systems. Adaptation and mitigation of climate change must  occur in tandem. 

Without action, agriculture will continue to be a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. But by adopting climate-smart practices and increasing the capacity of soils and forests to sequester carbon, emissions can be reduced while stepping up food production to feed the world's growing population, the report said. Food systems can further contribute by minimizing food losses and waste, as well as by promoting healthier diets that also leave a lighter environmental footprint.
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