Global aid targets resource security
Volume IX Issue 5
Published March 2018
As the world progressed into the 21st century, the populations of first world countries looked beyond their nation’s borders into the undeveloped regions of the world and rallied behind their cause.
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The discrepancies between preindustrial and industrial living became causes for humanitarian aid organizations and charity.
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At the 2012 United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20), an outline of international goals to address global issues was created, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which now guides international efforts in humanitarian aid.
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One of the most prominent of these humanitarian crises is securing access to food and water for everyone in the world — a concept denoted as food security.
However, even as the industrialized, global powers work to implement solutions in Africa and Southeast Asia, the number of food and water insecure people continues to grow.
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According to statistics from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a specialized U.N. agency, “World hunger is on the rise: the estimated number of undernourished people increased from 777 million in 2015 to 815 million in 2016.”
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With current technology, the world is more than capable than producing enough food to sustain the global population, yet nearly a billion of people remain without their basic needs fulfilled.
At the Rio+20 Conference, Secretary-General of the U.N. Ban Ki-moon said, “In a world of plenty, no one, not a single person. But almost one billion still do not have enough to eat. I want to see an end to world hunger everywhere within my lifetime.”
There are several major regions of the world that face food and water insecurity, the most prevalent in recent years being regions in Africa and Southeast Asia.
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Alexander Derhacobian, a junior, said, “Food insecurity affects a wide array of states, from developing countries like Nigeria to war-torn countries like Somalia and Yemen. It is also a pressing issue in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia.”
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Unfortunately, the setbacks these countries face is far more complex than limited water sources and poor soil.
The Global Water Partnership, a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) global action network, attributes growing food and water insecurity to unimproved water and land use, increased consumption of meat, climate change and natural disasters, and governmental interference and restrictions.
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The extent to which water scarcity impacts the global populous can be seen in the 2017 study by the World Health Organization and UNICEF that states, “2.1 billion people lack access to safely managed drinking water services; 4.5 billion people lack safely managed sanitation services.”
For example, in Bangladesh, a combination of suboptimal farming techniques, natural disasters, economic unbalance, and climate change has plagued the country’s progress toward attaining food security for the past several decades.
To combat such a variety of problems contributing to food insecurity, the United Nations created a number of committees to assess the levels of food security of the world’s countries, promote the plight of food insecure regions, and directly provide humanitarian aid in conjunction with various NGOs and government programs.
“The U.N. is generally successful in their humanitarian and relief efforts; they have set up various agencies and programs to tackle food insecurity,” Derhacobian said, “As always, there is room for improvement. Increased cooperation between respective governments and NGOs and the United Nations could possibly be one solution to the problem.”
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While many have been influenced by the work of UNICEF, the FAO, the World Food Program (WFP), the World Bank, and the Salvation Army, more recent developments in technology have allowed for even more progress to be made in many food insecure countries.
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Disaster resistant food storage and modern farming techniques implemented in Bangladesh by the World Bank (in addition to other organizations) has greatly improved the country’s production capabilities since the 20th century.
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An article from the World Bank said, “With one of the fastest rates of productivity growth in the world since 1995 (averaging 2.7 percent per year, second only to China), Bangladesh’s agricultural sector has benefited from a sound and consistent policy framework backed up by substantial public investments in technology, rural infrastructure and human capital.”
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Recently, the approach toward food security has adopted the use of technology improve four primary areas of food security: food availability, food access, food utilization, and food stability.
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The U.N. Economic and Social Council (UNESC) conference in 2017 focused on the theoretical implementation of scientific developments in the field of biotechnology, agriculture, and computer science to enhance crop yields, nutrition and dietary habits, irrigation, and natural disaster and climate change detection.
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The agenda from the 2017 UNESC meeting in Geneva states, “New, existing, and emerging technologies can address the four dimensions of food security […] The convergence of a number of emerging technologies, such as synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, tissue engineering, three-dimensional printing, drones and robotics, may have profound impacts on the future of food production and food security.”
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In addition to the actions of the international community and global agendas, contribution to the issues of food and water security can be made at even the most local scale through volunteer work, donations, and advocacy.
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UNICEF and other international organizations sanction high school clubs that link local volunteer efforts to the global stage; although Carlmont does not allow a UNICEF club, both Key Club and Red Cross exemplify a community’s work toward international humanitarian issues.
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According to the FAO, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food which meets their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.”
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With the combined might of modern technology, international organizations’ humanitarian aid, and local volunteering, the world hopes to reverse the influx of food insecure people and fulfill one of oldest humanitarian goals and achieve global food security.
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