Growing peace

A South Sudanese woman paints a heart wrenching picture of her country.

It is struggling to feed itself. Resources are stretched to breaking point. The on-going conflict makes water hard to come by and climate change is only making things worse.

“When the drought came, we lost everything”, she says. “We depend on imported food now”.

This insight from an audience member at a CFS44 side event on The regional and national state of food security and nutrition within the framework of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)  provided a poignant backdrop to proceedings.

The discussions centred on the question, How do we maintain and increase agricultural production during times of conflict? The link between the two is intractable.

Cue some relevant facts and figures from 2016:

• 815 million undernourished people in the world (just over one in nine), 489 million of whom lived in countries affected by violence and fragility.
• 64 million refugees and Internally Displaced People (IDPs) due to conflict. A doubling in less than a decade.

Read the full post on the CFS blog here.

This blogpost covers the CFS44 side event: “The regional and national state of food security and nutrition within the framework of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”

Blogpost by Teddy Searight, #CFS44 Social Reporter – T.Searight@cabi.org

Photo credit: pixabay All statistics used in this post were sourced from: FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, WFP and WHO. 2017. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2017. Building resilience for peace and food security.Rome, FAO

This post is part of the live coverage during the 44rd Session of the Committee on World Food Security, a social media project supported by GFAR. This post is written by one of our social reporters, and represents the author’s views only.