REPORT REVIEW: Solutions for Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems (original) (raw)

By: Aynalem Tadesse Dada Agriculture, whether it is commercialized or self-sufficient, matters not. Worldwide, it solely and indispensably produces the most critical, irreplaceable and unobsoletable resource, food. With the advent of the Holocene-the last 10,000 years, agriculture played a tantamount role that cannot be exaggerated to meaningfully perpetuate and progress the species, Homo sapience. An understanding of the future fate that agriculture in general and that of smallholders is of a 'dire urgency' to the design of policies to achieve the international development goals and targets, given the fact that smallholders account for more than 75% of the feeders of the so-called developing world. The majority of the world's extremely poor live in rural areas and have livelihoods which are bound closely to smallholder agriculture as farmers, laborer, transporters, marketers, and processors of products and as suppliers of non-agricultural services to households whose income is principally agriculture-deriven. Smallholder agriculture is presently a key sustainer and a redeemer of the majority of the world's poorest people, so the dynamics of smallholder agriculture ought to be a central question for research and debates about development. The transformational vision of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development calls on all countries and stakeholders to work together to 'end hunger in all its forms' and prevent all forms of malnutrition by 2030. This fondly ambition can only be fulfilled if agriculture and food systems become sustainable, so that food supplies are stable and all people at all times have access to adequate, nutritious, stable and food to lead healthy and happy life. The present report, I review is full of substantially objective and scientific recommendations and comments-a comprehensive direction for the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. The report begins by narrating arrays of analytical, provocative and though questions that necessitate urgency in clearing the fuzzy and settling the turbulence of competing interests and, of course, blurred future of our time. The thought-provoking questions ranging from: …How to leapfrog from the dwindling and vicious to sustaining, virtuous and perhaps thriving agriculture, a quest to change the production and consumption behaviors of the evolving giants like China and India, … to administrative and legal requirements to monitor and make best use of the frontier technologies and biotechnology, challenging food baskets and consumer behavior, etc.' Acknowledging the range of challenges (population growth, change in consumption pattern-driven by rising incomes, land degradation, climate change, volatile/ever skyrocketing food prices, etc.) that agriculture food systems face, the report calls for most comprehensive and complex approaches geared towards addressing complex problems, that will bring change in the current agriculture to meet the rising demand, to contribute more effectively to the reduction of poverty and malnutrition, and to become more ecologically sustainable. For doing so, the report mainly capitalizes in introducing, instilling and inculcating the newer concept, Sustainable Agricultural Intensification (SAI)-the approach believed to contribute to the efforts of eradicating hunger and malnutrition, improving the environmental performance of agriculture. This new concept, indeed, needs interventions that are transformative and simultaneous along the whole chain of agricultural production and marketing-from farm to fork.