'30% climate aid must go to agriculture'

Kaveh Zahedi, from UN FAO, stresses need for innovative solutions like agroforestry and sustainable farming

- Kaveh Zahedi, from UN FAO

AVEH ZAHEDI is the Director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In an interview with SV Krishna Chaitanya, he talks about the intertwined challenges of global hunger and climate change. Excerpts:

Agriculture is one of the major emitters of greenhouse gases. What work is FAO doing to tackle the challenge of food production as well as climate change?

We need to produce more with less. Today about 730 million people are still living in hunger. We still have malnutrition. We are still behind the targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG2) in terms of stunting. So, we know that right now we are not providing enough food for people around the world. The recent study that we did showed that it's a bit of an unequal picture. Whereas 1 in 9 are living in hunger globally, in Africa it's about 1 in 5, even higher incidence. The world population is growing towards 10 billion people by the middle of the century. So this is the landscape we are working in. At the same time, climate change is happening and already impacting our agriculture and the communities that depend on agriculture. We can't just work on food insecurity and forget the climate. We can't just work on climate and forget food insecurity. We have to do these two together.