Rome: The COVID-19 pandemic has set back progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), undermining decades of development efforts, according to a new report by the United Nations (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
"It's an alarming picture, in which progress on many SDG targets has been reversed, with a significant impact on all aspects of sustainable development and making the achievement of the 2030 Agenda even more challenging," said FAO Chief Statistician, Pietro Gennari, in a press release on Wednesday.
The analysis, Tracking progress on food and agriculture SDG-related indicators, focuses on eight of the SDGs, which were adopted at a UN Summit in New York in 2015.
According to the report, the COVID-19 pandemic might have pushed an additional 83 to 132 million people into chronic hunger in 2020, making the target of ending hunger even more distant.
Around 14 percent of all food is lost along the supply chain, before it even reaches the consumer, which FAO considers “an unacceptably high proportion”. Progress has also faltered towards maintaining plant and animal genetic diversity for food and agriculture.
Agricultural systems bear the brunt of economic losses due to disasters, small-scale food producers remain disadvantaged, and food price volatility has also increased, due to the constraints placed by the pandemic and lockdowns.
The report also focuses on gender, finding that women producers in developing countries earn less than men even when more productive; gender inequalities in land rights are pervasive; and discriminatory laws and customs remain obstacles to women's tenure rights.
Lastly, water stress remains alarmingly high in many regions, threatening progress towards sustainable development.
But the report also points to several areas in which progress is being made. These include: implementing measures against illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing; sustainable forest management; eliminating agricultural export subsidies; investment to boost agricultural productivity in developing countries; and duty-free access for developing and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) particularly for agricultural products.
The report stresses the need to: scale up investment in agriculture, improve access to new agricultural technologies, credit services and information resources for farmers; support small-scale food producers; conserve plant and animal genetic resources for food and agriculture; adopt measures to counter food price volatility, and prevent potentially hazardous events from devolving into full-blown disasters.
It also calls for more action to use water more efficiently in regions most affected by high water stress; better targeted interventions to reduce food losses and waste; more protection of terrestrial and forest ecosystems. Finally, it suggests much more progress is needed both on the legal and practical aspects of women's land rights and to combat the threat of IUU fishing to the sustainability of global fisheries.
Finally, the report makes an urgent call for more and better data.
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