The second global goal is to eradicate hunger worldwide once the SDGs are due in 2030. While recent years were marked by many setbacks, the global community is still working hard on reaching its goal in the upcoming decade.
Video Transcript
The second Sustainable Development Goal put forth is to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture,” by 2030.
While world hunger might be seen as a problem disproportionately affecting certain regions more than others, starvation, malnourishment, food insecurity, and unsustainable farming practices exist in every UN nation. Meeting SDG 2 by 2030 is hence a global issue and will involve work on multiple fronts:
Handling malnutrition involves combatting undernourishment and its effects, particularly wasting - a nasty disease caused by starvation that affects 50 million children worldwide - and stunting - reduced growth rate . 149 million children under 5 suffer from stunting.
Obesity which has been on the rise since the nineties, also poses serious problems to global health. Currently, 40 million children under 5 and over 2.1 billion adults are overweight. Good nutrition in childhood is of vital importance, and SDG 2 aims to make sure everyone, and especially children have easy and ready access to adequate healthy food.
Part of what we can do to work towards this goal involves increasing agricultural productivity, so that there is simply more food available. This increase in productivity should be accompanied by the development of more sustainable agricultural practices, that are resilient to climate change and protect the environment. Supporting small farmers, particularly women and indegenous farmers, by securing equal access to land, resources, and financial services will be vital to meeting this goal.
Additionally, sustainability in agriculture also includes maintaining the genetic diversity of crops, livestock and their wild counterparts, since genetic diversity is key to having healthy and stable agriculture.
To help along with all of these targets, the UN also specifies measures to be taken by governments to increase investments in agriculture. These include developing rural infrastructure and agricultural technologies to encourage productivity, preventing trade restrictions in agricultural markets, and taking action to regulate food markets to ensure a free flow of information and avoid dramatic price fluctuations.
Attention has long been paid to world hunger, but efforts need to be taken more seriously by all. From 2000 to 2015, there was a downward trend in malnourishment and an upwards trend in investment, but since 2015, there has been a reversal. In 2017, 820 million people were still undernourished, up from 785 million in 2015. Likewise, worldwide investment into agriculture has been on the decline and aid for agriculture in developing countries has also dropped by 12.6 billion dollars since the 1980s.
While these setbacks make the task of reaching SDG 2 by 2030 increasingly difficult, what this means is that efforts need to be doubled by everyone and every nation on a global scale. Those nations that are able to provide more aid and build more sustainable infrastructure need to recognize their global responsibility and need to help those with the greatest need.