PRESENT AND THE FUTURE OF OUR FOOD?
The 16th of October is World Food Day which is annually celebrated in memory of the establishment of The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1945. Since that day, FAO is trying to encourage both individuals to take action in their daily lives and countries to implement food policies. Let’s see how our food consumption is now and what kind of goals FAO tries to accomplish.
It is much better for us to have a clear understanding if we know what we waste rather than what we consume. As reported by FAO, each year, nearly 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted. This number is nearly the same as the whole food production of Sub-Saharan Africa. (1) In contrast to this, in developing countries obesity rates have been increasing in correlation with food waste. Apparently, in order to solve hunger problems and food scarcity, it is a must to work collaboratively with these two types of these societies. One of which has to be more aware of their food choices and the other one has to transform their production in a more sustainable way and this is where FAO comes into action.
Before I continue, it is important to remind you that, our previous post was about the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Second SDG is Zero Hunger (2) . The most obvious reason why the UN adopted this goal is until 1945 there was no general food policy and hunger deaths were more prevalent back in the day, in fact now people who face hunger as a daily issue has reached 828 million (3). In this regard, FAO’s actions have becoming more and more important for us, therefore let’s talk more about FAO.
FAO is chiefly aiming to reach a point where each person has access to enough and quality food to have healthy lives (4). Also, another important goals they have, are to prevent food waste around the world and transform the food industries in a sustainable way. The main way they take action is to collaborate with the governments and implement projects together. For instance, with the funding of the Turkish Government, FAO and UN Refugee Agency implemented 3 projects since 2017 (5) . It is better to talk about the backgrounds of these projects. Because of the Syrian crisis, Turkey has millions of Syrians under temporary protection. This unexpected number of immigrations put immense pressure on Turkey’s food logistics and supply, as a consequence, many Syrian immigrants and Turkish citizens faced hunger problems and food access problems. In order to solve these issues FAO conducted workshops to improve Syrian immigrants and host communities through dense vocational training which mainly work in agriculture and food production. As a result, the program has strengthened the means of incomes of fragile groups by diversifying their skill sets and enhanced job opportunities in the food industry, which in conclusion, eased the food policy of Turkey. In fact, these projects had another positive return which we also aimed for while conducting the Let’s Be United project which was to foster the socio-economic engagement of Turkish citizens and Syrian immigrants. They both contributed to the stabilization of communities in Turkey.
In a nutshell, food is one of the most important instruments of the world and food policies are becoming more significant as FAO takes action. With respect to this, we, as KUGA, aim to have a more sustainable world now and in the future, by keeping sustainable food policies in our most fundamental objectives.
Thank you for reading.
Written by Bora Çeliktürk
References
1 — B. K. Samanta (2013, June 5) Think-Eat-Save: Reduce Your Foodprint
2 — Neris Tiken (2022, May 4) 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations
3 — United Nations (2022, July 6) UN Report: Global hunger numbers rose to as many as 828 million in 2021
4 — FAO
5 — Food And Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2020, September 7) Resources, Partnerships — Impact 2020
