Healthy eating in a world without hunger

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It was on October 16 of exactly 40 years ago when FAO — the United Nations Food and Agriculture Agency — decided to celebrate World Food Day annually with the aim of spreading progress and raising awareness about food challenges and malnutrition. A good way to dive into this day is to ask about the progress of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2 which, in the framework of the 2030 Agenda, aims to end hunger, improve nutrition and promote environmentally sustainable agriculture.

In fact, the recent review of the progress made in the 2030 Agenda by the United Nations General Assembly, as well as the previous report of its secretary general, is not optimistic about it. António Guterres synthesizes it by saying that the progress of many SDGs has been slow, that the most vulnerable people continue to suffer the most and that the global response so far has not been ambitious enough, either in the direction or intensity of the required changes. Its reflection in SDG 2 is that 821 million people go hungry, a figure that has increased for the third consecutive year, that a fifth of the po[CENSORED]tion of sub-Saharan Africa is malnourished and that public spending on agriculture has decreased by 37%. That means that we are increasingly farther from the target.

If we really want to provoke a turning point in food, we are bound to face at least three sets of complex and interdependent problems simultaneously. First, the democratic deficit of our food system. Today we produce more than three times as much food as 60 years ago, but almost one billion people do not have access to them. The poorest countries depend on imports to feed their po[CENSORED]tion and live permanently exposed and unprotected against the fluctuations of markets and speculators. And so, while the food system is increasingly concentrated in a few companies that control the entire process of the food chain, from planting or breeding to distribution and has great power to influence prices and small markets Family farming is excluded from the markets and is increasingly having difficulty accessing inputs, credits, or producing their own food.

According to FAO, in the developing countries there are 500 million small farms that support almost two billion people and produce around 80% of the food consumed in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. However, according to Guterres' report, its productivity is systematically lower than that of all other food producers.

    Food cannot be a privilege of a few, but a right of all people, linked to their human dignity

Secondly, we must urgently face the environmental deficit in food production. According to the recent report of the Intergovernmental Group of Experts on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate change and land, agricultural activities related to food production occupy 49% of the total land area free of ice. And the human impact on ecosystems is devastating. We produce more at the cost of great pressure on the planet's resources: deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, use of 70% of available fresh water, pollution of rivers and lands by the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, erosion processes and impoverishment of land related to monocultures, emission of greenhouse gases ...

According to this report, the use of chemical fertilizers has increased by 800% since 1961 and, currently, the whole food production and consumption is responsible for the emission of one third of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. In turn, greater global warming makes food production increasingly difficult, especially in countries with high climate and social vulnerability.

Third, we have to face the health deficit of our eating habits, which in the last 50 years have changed radically. Today we consume a large amount of meat, dairy and industrialized products with excess lipids, sugars or hypersalates. Simultaneously we have reduced our consumption of cereals, legumes, fruits and vegetables. In addition, we consume food from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year, causing a great ecological footprint, related to transport, plastics ... These new eating habits increase the health risks associated with cardiovascular diseases, diabetes or cancer . One of its most striking consequences is the simultaneous coexistence of one billion malnourished people, with two billion