Press briefing on the FAO's SDGs progress report
Dorian Navarro, Statistician at FAO briefed Geneva based correspondents on thenew edition the FAO “Tracking progress on food and agriculture-related SDG indicators” report released on Monday 19 September 2022, complementing the global SDG progress report presented in July.
The report offered detailed analyses and illustrated trends for selected indicators for which FAO was custodian, or which had important implications for food and agriculture across eight SDGs. FAO’s assessment painted a bleak picture of sustainable development. While the world was already off track to meeting the SDGs prior to 2020, the past two years had seen a series of cascading crises that had halted or even reversed progress across several SDG targets. Armed conflicts, growing inequalities and climate change were compounding the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, seriously putting the achievement of the SDGs at risk.
Comparing progress achieved in 2022 with respect to the previous year, only three indicators registered a notable improvement; the conservation of plant genetic resources, instruments to promote small-scale fisheries, and water use efficiency. By contrast, investment in agriculture and food loss reduction had stalled, small scale food producers – especially women – continued to be disadvantaged, and indicators related to food security, fish stock sustainability, forest area, water stress and the value added of sustainable fisheries, were deteriorating.
Despite hopes that the world would recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and food security would begin to improve, world hunger rose further in 2021. After remaining relatively unchanged since 2015, the prevalence of undernourishment jumped from 8.0 to 9.3 percent from 2019 to 2020 and rose at a slower pace in 2021 to 9.8 percent. Globally, food loss estimates had risen from 13 percent in 2016 to 13.3 percent, showing no progress towards the target, while substantial variation across regions and subregions has been recorded. The agricultural sector had borne the brunt of economic losses due to frequent natural disasters. Direct economic losses attributed to disasters amounted to USD 15.4 billion in 2020, of which USD 6.8 billion were recorded in the agricultural sector.
FAO’s report urged national stakeholders and the international community to take urgent actions to put the world back on track to reach the SDGs related to food and agriculture, including scaling up investments in data collections and in the statistical capacity of countries. The report is available in all six UN languages.
Source: United Nations Information Service (UNIS) Geneva
Related links:
Food and agriculture in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development
Tracking progress on food and agriculture-related SDG indicators 2022