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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