蜜芽传媒

Food security has been thrust into the limelight as the Ukraine war has shown how shocks to the global system can lead to shortages of essential grains. In Ivory Coast, a United Nations conference is getting under way charged with bringing back to full health millions of hectares of land around the world that could be made fit for agriculture or even wildlife.

The chief scientist to the United Nation's biggest conference on desertification, the so-called COP on Combatting Desertification, is Barron Orr. From Abidjan, he told Newsday the delegates were focused on changing practices to move from unsustainable to sustainable land use.

鈥淲e want to conserve land that has not been degraded. We want to sustainably use through good agricultural practices what鈥檚 already in production. And we want to reverse degradation through ecological rehabilitation and restoration where we鈥檝e already had big impact.鈥�

鈥淲e鈥檙e way beyond the days of planting trees to solve the problem. We鈥檙e talking about linking value chains to what communities are trying to do to address their land. We鈥檝e got global commitments. The G20 alone has committed to reducing [by] 50 per cent land degradation by 2040. And there are already grocery chains in Europe where you can鈥� scan a bar code鈥� to see [their] supply chain to determine was it sustainably practiced.鈥�

(Pic: Farmers on horseback in central plateau, Ethiopia; Credit: 蜜芽传媒)

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