Weekend reading: A Sustainable Food Future

I’m always interested in recommendations for how we are to solve world food problems—population increase, environmental degradation, climate change—in the immediate future.

Here is one approach from a group of highly official agencies from the United Nations in collaboration with the World Bank.

The report’s five areas of recommendation:

1. Reduce growth in demand for food and other agricultural products
2. Increase food production without expanding agricultural land
3. Protect and restore natural ecosystems and limit agricultural land-shifting
4. Increase fish supply
5. Reduce GHG [Greenhouse gas] emissions from agricultural production

The report is 564 pages.  There is a lot in it.  The one question it does not answer: Where is the political will to make any of this happen?  It mentions political will five times, for example, “Success would depend primarily on political will” (page 406).

How to get political will?  That needs to be the subject of another report, apparently.