Leave NO ONE Behind

 

Image Credit : Thisal Walgampaya
Written by : Gayathma Weerawanni

Leave NO ONE behind

 “In the face of a looming global food crisis, we need to harness the power of solidarity and collective momentum to build a better future where everyone has regular access to enough nutritious food,” FAO Director-General QU Dongyu 

The annual celebration of the world food day commemorates the founding in 1945 of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and this year's theme is “Leave NO ONE behind, bridging connections directly with the SDG goals.

End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture or the SDG 2, seeks long-term solutions to eradicate all forms of hunger by 2030 and achieve food security. The goal is to ensure that everyone, everywhere has enough nutritious food to live a healthy life. Achieving this Goal will demand improved food access and widespread advocacy of sustainable agriculture. This comprises increasing small-scale farmers' productivity and earnings through fostering equal access to land, technology, and markets, as well as sustainable food production systems and resilient agricultural practices. It also necessitates larger investments through international cooperation to boost agricultural productivity in emerging economies.

Taking all of this entry goal's underlying objectives into account, a collection of significant interactions between different goals to make the world a better place to everyone can be identified. The interaction of sustainable development goals such as no poverty, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation makes it prominent and significant. Ensuring that all people have access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food all year round is strongly intertwined with poverty eradication, and as such, addressing undernutrition is closely related to poverty. Growth in agriculture is at least twice as effective as growth in almost any other sector in poverty alleviation. Malnutrition continues to be a major contributor to the global prominent diseases. The status of quality food and nutrition is a main and important factor of health and well-being. Agriculture has a direct impact on mental, emotional, and physical health because of its ability to offer a sufficient quantity of healthy food for direct consumption. Undernutrition acts as a cause for interruptions to education, increasing the negative effects of many other aspects of poverty. It is connected with delayed school enrollment, impaired concentration, more schooling interrupted due to illness. Just as health outcomes and nutritional status are closely connected, a child's ability to learn and nutrition are mutually advantageous.  Women play critical roles in food production, food preparation, and child care, therefore ending hunger and enhancing nutrition is critical for them.  Undernourished girls and women are often losing the opportunities and advantages of development resources due to sickness, and reluctance to travel or attend meetings that could benefit them. As a result, they are less capable of contributing to the goals of equality and empowerment. Efforts toward "zero hunger and leave NO One behind" is strongly dependent on progress in securing the availability and long-term management of water and sanitation. Agriculture is by far the greatest user of water. Irrigated agriculture accounts for the majority of water withdrawals and a larger proportion of water consumption.

Universal access to safe and nutritious food, end all forms of malnutrition, Increasing the productivity and incomes of small-scale food producers, maintaining the genetic diversity in food production are some of the targets that can be achieved to ensure this year’s theme indirectly. Reducing food waste due to inefficient preparations, poor transporting facilities, over selective customers and insufficient storage facilities will lead more food to a secure community, promoting diversification which deviates the focus from a single food crop or staple which allows diversified and a healthy diet, closing the yield gap by intensifying sustainable agriculture through soil management and land improvement, buying the irregular and the ‘funny’ fruits and vegetables that might otherwise go to waste, consuming less meat are major ways to achieve ‘zero hunger’ which can be followed even from a personal extent and make EVERYONE COME ALONG.

Millions of people in the world suffer from acute hunger, due to climatic changes, man made conflicts and economic swifts. The number has doubled due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Most of the people are at the brink of starvation. A profound action must be taken to provide food and a new global food and agricultural system needs to be introduced to the world to increase food productivity because hunger is not an issue of charity, it is an issue of justice and everyone deserves to have a full stomach every day in their lives.