Question

Food security in farming system 1

Answer 1

Answer:

The concept of sustainability has three dimensions: economic, environmental and social. A sustainable farming system should be a profitable business that creates mutually beneficial relationships among workers and the surrounding community, and contributes to the sound management of the land and other natural resources. SDG 2, 'End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture', makes it clear how important the promotion of sustainable agriculture is to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As their name suggests, the SDGs have a strong focus on all the dimensions of sustainability.

The heightened emphasis on sustainability in agriculture is due to the fact that the recent achievements in agriculture, which have led to major improvements in productivity that have enabled food production to keep up with population growth, have often come at high social and environmental costs. For example, FAO (2011a) estimates that, as a result of the combined demands of agriculture and other sectors, more than 40 percent of the world’s rural population lives in river basins that are classified as water scarce. Each year, soil erosion destroys 10 million hectares of cropland. Forty percent of this loss is due to tillage erosion . Genetic erosion, which is partly a result of intensive agricultural production systems that use fewer and more genetically uniform crop varieties, has created a situation where genetic vulnerability (when a widely planted crop is uniformly susceptible to a pest, pathogen or environmental hazard as a result of its genetic constitution) threatens agricultural production in 60 countries. Progress in raising agricultural production has been made largely by producers that have access to inputs and markets, and secure rights to use the land and other resources, which many smallholder producers, especially women, do not have. As a result social inequity has increased in many rural areas, and food security in agricultural communities in developing countries has remained stubbornly high. All of these collateral effects of modern agricultural production are now jeopardizing the accomplishments of past development strategies, and have pushed sustainability to the very heart of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development