HLPF 2018: General Debate

 

 

2018 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies
General Debate

Lucas Tavares, Senior Liaison Officer, FAO Liaison Office with the United Nations in New York

 

 

Mr. Chair,

Ladies and gentlemen,

Three years after the adoption of the 2030 Agenda, hunger is on the rise and urgent action is needed to reverse this trend. At the same time, obesity and other forms of malnutrition are a growing concern not only in developed but also in developing countries.

And while over 800 million people are undernourished, one third of the food produced is wasted or lost. And, with it, we lose precious natural resources, water and land, that we need to sustainably use and manage.

We are seeing rapid urbanization throughout the world. Growing population in the cities requires increased supply of food, services, social protection and opportunities for city dwellers.

However, while urban population is growing, demanding the rural sector to respond to part of their needs, extreme poverty remains concentrated in rural areas. In fact, around eighty percent of the world’s poor live are rural people. They include family farmers, forest dwellers and indigenous peoples and women and youth are particularly affected. Rural populations also have less access to opportunities and services. Energy access rate is of 73 percent in rural areas compared to 96 in urban areas, according to Sustainable Energy for All. Rural communities also lag behind urban areas in terms of access to drinking water and sanitation. For example, around 70 percent of the world’s 2 billion people without access to adequate sanitation live in rural areas.

These challenges cannot be dealt with in isolation or in opposition to each other. A new alliance between urban and rural populations is needed, with comprehensive interventions to ensure inclusive, resilient and sustainable food systems, as to leave no one behind both in rural and urban areas.

As FAO and others have underlined in the High-Level Political Forum (HLPF), there are few human activities that connect all the dimensions of sustainable development defined in the 2030 Agenda as closely as food systems.

Inclusive and sustainable food systems can directly and positively influence the availability of food and the quality of diets, the efforts to eradicate poverty and the creation of decent jobs, contributing also to the health, well-being and resilience of rural populations.

Transforming food systems is also necessary to ensure that agriculture in its broader sense, encompassing from crop production to fisheries, supports the sustainable use and management of natural resources. Looking at two goals reviewed at this HLPF, sustainable agriculture is critical to increase the efficiency and water use and to protect, restore and sustainably use and manage terrestrial ecosystems including land, forests and mountains, and to halt biodiversity loss.

Sustainable and inclusive food systems are pathways to sustainable development, but in turn can only be successful if we advance the 2030 Agenda as a whole.

Thank you for your attention.