SDG 2

Zero Hunger

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WHAT’s THIS ABOUT?

A profound change of the global food and agriculture system is needed if we are to nourish the 821 million people who are hungry today and the additional 2 billion people expected to be undernourished by 2050. Investments in agriculture are crucial to increasing the capacity for agricultural productivity and sustainable food production systems are necessary to help alleviate the perils of hunger. 

Agriculture remains the future of humanity, not its past, and businesses have a crucial role to play in making sure that it is a bright future, by promoting nutritious food in the workplace and on foodstore shelves, by investing in technological advances that can help agricultural systems transition to sustainable production models and adapt to climate change, and by supporting farming communities worldwide live decently from their noble work. 

Still today, agriculture is the single largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for 40% of today’s global population, and the largest source of income and jobs for poor rural households. Fighting hunger, combating poverty, requires that all actors, businesses included, invest more in supporting small-scale and family agriculture.

Choose your impact opportunities

IO1 INCREASE ACCESS TO NUTRITIOUS FOOD

  • 1 in every 9 persons in the world suffers from hunger and after several years of reduction, this ratio is increasing again since 2010 - especially in middle income countries among the poors.

    Even more people (1 in 6) are considered at risk of suffering from hunger, in particular during economic shocks, due to food price vulnerability and as a result of natural disasters and climate change impact.

    At the same time, 2 in 5 adults are overweight, due to poor nutrition and sedentary lifestyles, and the proportion is increasing as well in all age groups and in all regions. Infants, children,2 adolescent girls, pregnant and lactating women and older persons are at particular risk of malnutrition due to their unique nutritional needs and, often, less advantageous position in society.

  • Business can tackle several barriers to improved nutrition: awareness, affordability and availability. For example, businesses that provide on-site catering to their employees can apply greater scrutiny on the provenance of their food supplies and select menus that privilege nutritious and safe options; any business can also organize awareness sessions on good nutrition habits to their staff.

    Affordability of nutritious food is often a problem for low-income populations, and businesses can start by giving out food vouchers to their lower-wage staff to purchase healthy groceries from local stores or making food donations to local charities - reducing thereof food wastage - and support food education programmes in low-income neighborhoods.

    Food retailers can expand their store network in poorer and underserved communities, dedicate more space in these to fresh products as well as package quality foodstuffs in smaller unit packages. For those businesses specialized in food production, improving nutrition labelling is essential - and now generally imposed also by regulators - but also needs to be accompanied by measures taken to improve the nutritional value of produced foodstuffs, including for special needs customer categories. 

  • Malnutrition, poverty and poor health are largely interrelated. By doing its part to improve access to nutritious food, your business will contribute to improving living standards, household earnings and ultimately, economic growth.

    Countries may lose 2-3% of their gross domestic product (GDP) as a result of various nutrient deficiencies. Supporting better access to nutritious food will also help reduce the costs of healthcare spending on individuals and governments - and for businesses, better fed staff also means lesser absenteeism, health insurance costs for your company and higher productivity.

    For the agrifood sector, adapting your business model to produce better quality foodstuffs - and at more affordable prices - is a must in a market where customers across all income groups are increasingly sensitive to nutrition issues and ready to pay for it. 

IO2 Advance Sustainable Agriculture

  • Agriculture accounts for around a third of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, from production to supply chains and distribution; livestock production is around a third that total. As populations and economies flourish, food demand will grow by up to 70% globally by 2050, if we don’t adjust our diets. 

    Growth in meat demand alone, if it remains on the same upward path, could swallow our entire remaining carbon budget to keep us under 1.5°c warming by 2040. Yet, climate change alone is expected to reduce agricultural productivity globally by around 17% at the same time that we are seeking to increase production.

  • All businesses can promote more sustainable agriculture by sourcing sustainably produced food for their canteens and raising awareness of their staff on the need to shift to environmentally-friendly food choices, investing their CSR contributions to support farming communities in adopting more sustainable practices and by avoiding to use agricultural land for the development of their operations. More and more businesses also start farming their green spaces and rooftops to serve their own food consumption and promote sustainable food habits among their staff and their families.

    Agri-food businesses involved in agricultural production can contribute to sustainable agricultural productivity growth by investing in developing new farming products, practices and technologies that are more respectful of the environment, climate-resilient and support farming communities, especially in low-income countries that experience the highest gaps in agricultural productivity compared to their population growth, access more appropriate information and training, and more environment-friendly technology and farming inputs.

    Food processing businesses and the food retail industry can decide to source only responsibly-produced supplies and foodstuffs, invest in reducing their waste during processing and preparation, promote waste reduction across their supply chain and donate unused safe food to charities.

  • If your business works in the agrifood sector, adopting more sustainable environmentally-friendly and climate-resilient practices, or promoting these in your supply chain, might be the only way to keep up your benefits in the long run as agricultural productivity will not continue growing, and in some regions will keep decreasing, if the world keeps with industrialized farming only. A lowering productivity means higher production costs and higher risks of breakdowns in your supply chain. From the demand side, as climate and the environment are the #1 concern among young people,6 your business may not be able to maintain and expand its customer base if not practicing and demonstrating greater attention to sustainable practices, including waste reduction, in the agricultural production and/or processing operations that your business depends on.

    If your business is outside of the agrifood sector, paying greater attention to source environmentally-sustainable products to meet the food needs of your company will have positive impacts on the health of your workforce, will help attract and retain young talents who prioritize healthy food habits at their workplace. While sustainably-produced food can come at a higher price, by shifting to locally-produced and seasonal products, promoting more vegetarian-based options and reducing food waste (including for packaging), you can maintain your food bill to the same level while contributing to positive structural changes in the agri-food sector.  

IO3 SUPPORT SMALL SCALE FARMERS & PRODUCERS

  • Agriculture is the single largest employer in the world, providing livelihoods for 40 per cent of today’s global population. It is the largest source of income and jobs for poor rural households. 88 % of the 570 million farms worldwide are small (less than 2 ha), most still rainfed and family-owned, but provide up to 80 % of food consumed in a large part of the developing world. Investing in smallholder women and men is an important way to increase food security and nutrition for the poorest, as well as food production for local and global markets.1 Yet, most farmers now earn less in every dollar that we spend on food, despite rising costs of living, as large food processing and retail companies pull prices always lower.

    This is particularly damaging to small-scale farmers, in particular women, indigenous peoples, family farmers, pastoralists and fishers, who do not have the levels of productivity found in industrial farming, have smaller harvest sizes, limited storage and delivery capacity and are more exposed to disaster risks. This is no surprise henceforth that two-thirds of extremely poor employed workers worldwide are agricultural workers.

    Strengthening the resilience and adaptive capacity of small-scale and family farmers is critical to reversing the trend of the rise in hunger and eradicating poverty.

  • Businesses procuring agricultural products for their operations or simply for in-house catering to their employees can take steps to increase the share of products coming from small-scale farmers and food processors - and those in the vicinity of their areas of operations in particular. They should strive to pay them a fair price for their products, which should never be below their production costs. 

    Specialized businesses can invest in developing technological solutions and farming inputs that are affordable to small farmers, safe to use yet effective. This includes also farmers’ information needs, such as market and climate data. In times of increasing climatic incidents and extreme price volatility, providing adapted financial products (micro-loans, crop insurance, savings accounts) that can help small-farmers become self-sustainable, improve their productivity and resilience against disasters, is essential. Supporting research on and disseminating climate-smart varieties and breeds, is also an imperative. All businesses extracting resources from land and seas should commit to not encroach on the land, forests or fishing areas of small-scale producers.

    In all what they do to support small-scale farming, businesses should remember to equally support women as men: worldwide, if the same farming resources were made available to women farmers as men farmers, it is estimated that 150 m people would go out of hunger.

  • Measures on supply chains to make them more inclusive of small farmers and food processors can make a big change locally on food security and poverty eradication, with a minor impact on your business. Although supply chains might be large and opaque, this should not discourage your company from upholding the highest standards of sustainability in sourcing practices, enhancing traceability of input materials and demonstrating transparency in the supply chain, since its global impact is of high importance.

    Businesses taking steps to better share their generated value-added with small farmers and farming communities will be positively recognized by customers who are know well aware of the “fair trade” movement and increasingly keen on re-localizing their consumption. 

IO$ ADVOCATE FOR FAIR AGRICULTURAL MARKETS

  • The global food system has become more vulnerable and susceptible to episodes of extreme price volatility, among other reasons because of an increase in extreme climatic events, reliance on international trade to meet food needs and the financialisation of food commodities.

    If a downward trend has been observed in agriculture export subsidy outlays over the last decade, this progress risks being overturned by the recent trade tensions between the US and differents parts of the world that have lead again to the stiffening of import barriers, spiking of export subsidies on agricultural products. This contributes unfortunately to deprive farmers and food producers in developing countries of a fair access to global markets. This has grave consequences on the economic well-being of vulnerable populations and on their food security.

    In 2018, most of the countries (81 %) where economic shocks worsened the severity of the food crises were high primary commodity-dependent countries. Global demand for commodities could slow down by one-third over the next decade, especially for agriculture and metals, and countries dependent on commodity exports may struggle to adjust.

  • Businesses and business associations can advocate for the removal of trade barriers and export subsidies and against export restrictions for agricultural and food products as they compound uncertainty and undermine the role of trade. How they should also advocate for sustainable farming and the fight against climate change to become overriding goals of trade facilitation deals in the agricultural sector.

    Businesses can help develop digital solutions for better information, analysis and transparency of global and local agricultural markets to reduce the incidence and magnitude of panic-driven price surges. Financial services and trading companies should support regulations put in place by governments across all food commodity futures exchanges and markets and abide by the need for greater transparency on trading data, especially across over-the-counter (OTC) markets, where transactions take place off the regulated commodity exchanges.

    Refraining from these kinds of investments, as more investment banks and pension funds do it now,4 is always the best solution. More generally, being aware of their impact on food price inflation, for example through soft commodity trading or other investing activities, could be a good first step for businesses to take action in favor of fair and stable agricultural markets. 

    Investing in raising agricultural productivity for a diverse set of crops that proves both competitive and sustainable, as well as by promoting dietary diversification, is also a pathway for action for agri-food businesses.

  • Food price inflation makes nutrition unavailable for large parts of the world and eventually affects everyone on the planet, especially in a context of increasing income inequalities.

    It will affect your workforce and customers and may reduce both their productivity and consumption. It therefore makes sense for your company, and especially if you operate in the financial and trading sector, to look at your impact on food price inflation and volatility.

IO5 PROMOTE FOOD DIVERSITY

  • Since the 1900s, some 75 % of crop diversity has been lost from farmers’ fields, and nowadays, just nine plants account for 66% of the world's crop production.

    For animal breeds, 20 % of local breeds were classified as at risk in 2017 and the stored genetic material was sufficient to reconstitute only 7 % of national breed populations should they become extinct.1 This lack of diversity jeopardizes the entire food system in case of a plant pest or animal disease pandemic. The prospect of increasing and worsening climate change impact alsos threatens crop and animal production systems around the world and requires more climate-resilient varieties and breeds that could be found in local genetic material around the globe’s myriads of natural ecosystems, if it were not being lost fast.  

    Better use of agricultural biodiversity can contribute to more nutritious diets, enhanced livelihoods for farming communities and more resilient and sustainable farming systems.

    Agricultural crop diversification can improve resilience to pest and disease outbreaks, as well as buffer crop production against the effects of greater climate.

    Efforts are being made to preserve more of the plant and animal breed genetic materials through gene banks around the globe, including regional and international centres, but more needs to be done.

  • All businesses can act responsibly for promoting genetic diversity in food systems by paying attention to the types of food procured for their staff’s consumption or for their operations (in the case of food processors, distributors and the hospitality industry). Preferring local, traditional crops and animal breeds, produced with more environmentally-respectful methods, incentivizes food producers to retain and re-generate genetic diversity.

    Businesses can start vegetable gardens or other crop & animal productions on site (green spaces, rooftops) restricted to local breeds and also use these for educational programmes towards their staff and their families to emulate at their house. The same can be done for beehives and other biodiversity protection tools and areas.

    Agri-food businesses have of course a major role in preserving and restoring genetic diversity by increasing in their operations, or through their supply chain, the use of local & traditional breeds and the phasing out the use of practices and chemicals damaging heavily biodiversity and in particular pollinating insects and pest-killers (e.g. birds, reptiles). Businesses can support the setting up of more gene banks across the globe as well as events, facilities and skills promoting cultural and traditional knowledge on local crops, breeds, agricultural and husbandry practices.

  • An hyper concentration of global food systems into a narrow base of crop and animal genetic material is a strategic risk for humanity at large - businesses have the same interest than any other actors in society to avoid a catastrophic scenario in this regard. Promoting genetic diversity is also an essential component of our climate change adaptation process which concerns us all. If your business is in the agri-food sector, you are even more directly concerned as the more your harvests, animal protein production or supply of raw materials depend on a narrow genetic base, the higher risk that you suffer major disruptions to your operations in case of pandemics and accelerating climate change impact. Demonstrating your support to genetic diversity also participates in building the image of a business that cares for local knowledge and heritage,and local farming communities - all of which are nowadays important values increasingly shaping consumption patterns in our societies