In a series of investigative articles, The Guardian newspaper describes how climate change and the consequent food shortage have pushed the inhabitants of Guatemala to emigrate en masse to the United States, swelling the number of climate migrants.
According to calculations by the Global Footprint Network, by July 29 humanity had used up the budget of natural resources the planet makes available every year. The Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) has calculated that the demand for food accounts for 26% of the global ecological footprint. Even today, one third of the food produced is lost or wasted and with it the natural resources used.
Lawrence Okettayot and Morris Opiyo, two young entrepreneurs in their twenties, have created a dryer that uses agricultural processing waste and paper to best preserve food products such as bananas, mango, okra and eggplant. The system is designed not to produce emissions that are harmful to the environment and the climate.
Journalist Alison Stine kept a diary to show how environmentally-friendly choices, particularly in the food sector, are still too expensive for the poor. “The burden of making environmentally-friendly choices has been placed on the consumer, but this is not possible for the poorest in society” was her complaint at the end of the trial week.
The B2B platform called Seafood Souq was launched by a group of friends working in the fish farming and computer engineering sectors. This happens because, according to the founders of the service, there is no transparency in the seafood market anywhere along the supply chain of the United Arab Emirates. This however allows consumers to access information they had no access to in the past.
This was confirmed by Chinese prime minister Xi Jinping during the Seventh Kubuqi International Desert Forum. The Kubuqi desert is the seventh largest in the world. Over the last few decades, over 6,000 square kilometers of desert have been returned to fertility thanks to the efforts of the Chinese government, local authorities and companies. The campaign has created around a million jobs for local people.
FAO Director General José Graziano da Silva has appealed strongly for more effective measures to be taken to combat the global obesity pandemic, appealing to countries to adopt fiscal and legislative policies to promote healthier diets. He also underlined how it is increasingly difficult to find healthy food in our cities.