IMechE president Professor Isobel Pollock travelled to New York in February to represent the institution at a United Nations discussion on combating world hunger. The invitation to attend followed the launch earlier this year of the institution’s report Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not.
The discussion panel formed part of the special joint meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council and the Economic and Financial Committee of the General Assembly on Food Security and Nutrition: Scaling up the Global Response. The meeting was intended to rally support for international action on malnutrition, and to address both the immediate issue of volatile food prices and long-term questions of production, trade and consumption of food.
It was built around a panel discussion featuring representatives from government and professional bodies, who shared national experiences and outlined programme and policy options for securing a hunger-free future for all.
The meeting also sought to build on momentum generated by last June’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development. During that historic summit, known as Rio+20, world leaders pledged to boost output from sustainable agriculture, as well as farming productivity, an effort that would entail creating a freer, more equitable trading system.
The special joint meeting was told that focus, pragmatism and determination were among the keys to meeting the “eminently solvable” challenge of ending hunger. Top officials from the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly’s Second Committee called for concrete actions and targeted investments to enhance food security and scale-up nutrition.
Néstor Osorio, president of the Economic and Social Council, who co-chaired the meeting, said that more recently the heads of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the World Food Programme had issued a joint plea for coordinated international action to address the immediate crisis posed by volatile food prices and more long-term structural challenges.
“Today, we gather to answer that call by taking stock of developments in this area and determining how to scale-up the response,” said Osorio.
George Wilfred Talbot, the chair of the Second Committee and co-chair of the meeting, said that “more and better must be done” to tackle food insecurity, a problem he described as “eminently solvable”. Governments, the UN, society and the private sector all had important roles to play in strengthening agriculture and tackling malnutrition, he said, warning that dithering “could prove deadly”.
The two-fold mission to establish a more secure future required addressing volatile food prices and making structural policy changes in production, consumption and trade. Pointing to “glimmers of hope” seen in recent trends, such as rising agricultural investment in Africa and the strengthening of safety nets across the developing world, he said they were vital to the fulfilment of the Rio+20 pledge of a “future free from hunger”.
He added that the international community must now identify the root causes of food insecurity. It must draw upon best practices from around the world to offer practical, empirically grounded solutions, while encouraging stakeholders to work even more closely together in building support for action, especially on the Rio+20 commitments.
Addressing the meeting by video link from Rome, FAO director-general José Graziano da Silva said that ending hunger for nearly 870 million people around the world was one of the main challenges for the international community. “And we can do it,” he declared, urging concrete steps to improve access and curb the loss and waste that affected nearly one third of the food stocks produced today.
He argued that there was a need to replicate on the global level significant national-level actions similar to Niger’s renowned 3N (Nigériens Nourissent les Nigériens, or Nigériens Feeding Nigériens) Initiative and Guyana’s sustainable agriculture production programme. Among the factors driving food insecurity were rapid population and income growth, climate change and, in some instances, conflict.
He expressed hope that, with food security under discussion at the UN and in global forums such as the G20, stakeholders now recognised it as a political issue. This was the first step towards ensuring a comprehensive international response.
Urging the international community to adopt a specific timeframe for the eradication of hunger and extreme poverty, he said: “In a globalised world, we cannot have food security in only one country or one region.”
During the panel discussion, Professor Isobel Pollock asked about the reasons for global food waste, and the international community’s role in reducing it, and said: “While the developed and developing worlds responded differently to waste, engineers could help to address the issue in both. In developing countries, spoiling in the supply chain between field and market was a major factor, exacerbated by poor crop handling at harvest, as well as inadequate storage and transport infrastructure, which led to losses of 35% to 50% of fruit and vegetable crops.
“Waste in developed countries occurred more often through rejection and unnecessary purchasing in the marketplace, while loss in consumers’ homes was due to wastefulness. The problem can be tackled, but requires a broad-based response.”
She went on to emphasise that the international community must establish appropriate mechanisms to transfer engineering know-how from developed to developing countries to help prevent unnecessary losses.
International bodies such as the FAO and the Committee on World Food Security needed programmes to monitor and verify food waste and loss, with the data disseminated globally to help drive cultural changes. She said that governments must work with those international bodies, with developed-country governments tackling waste through marketing and consumer behaviour.
She called for international aid programmes to employ engineers and technical experts to reduce mistakes and waste in developing countries, and to ensure that equipment used was compatible and suitable.
For the panel discussion at the UN, IMechE president Professor Isobel Pollock (above) joined these experts from around the globe: Leslie Ramsammy, minister for agriculture, Guyana; Amadou Allahoury Diallo, high commissioner of the 3N Initiative Nigériens Feeding Nigériens, Niger; Jonathan Shrier, special representative on global food security, US; Loretta Dormal Marino, deputy director-general, Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, European Commission; Jos Verbeek, lead economist and manager, Global Monitoring Report, World Bank; Ellen Gustafson, member of the advisory board, Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition; and Debra A Jones, director and UN representative in New York, Save the Children.