World Food Day next month will concentrate minds on how to tackle the challenges thrown up by mass population movements.
Events will take place in more than 150 countries worldwide on 16 October as part of the World Food Day initiative from the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. The central focus is to deliver UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 – to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030.
“Reaching #ZeroHunger is possible: out of the 129 countries monitored by FAO, 72 have already achieved the target of halving the proportion of people who suffer from hunger; over the past 20 years, the likelihood of a child dying before age five has been nearly cut in half, with about 17,000 children saved every day; extreme poverty rates have been cut in half since 1990,” the FAO website states.
This year’s theme is Change the future of migration. Invest in food security and rural development.
“Creating conditions that allow rural people, especially youth, to stay at home when they feel it is safe to do so, and to have more resilient livelihoods, is a crucial component of any plan to tackle the migration challenge.
“Rural development can address factors that compel people to move by creating business opportunities and jobs for young people that are not only crop-based (such as small dairy or poultry production, food processing or horticulture enterprises). It can also lead to increased food security, more resilient livelihoods, better access to social protection, reduced conflict over natural resources and solutions to environmental degradation and climate change,” the FAO website says.
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