AGRICULTURE WILL need to adapt to what an expert called “climate-smart agriculture” to ensure food security for all, a meeting in Dublin heard last night.
Alexendre Meybeck, of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, was outlining challenges faced by agriculture from climate change in a Mansion House meeting.
He said one of the biggest challenges would be providing food for a projected population of nine billion people in the face of climate change and growing competition for the use of natural resources.
He described climate-smart agriculture as agricultural systems which adapted to the conditions in which food was being produced.
“In Africa, for instance, the mortality rate in calves is 25 per cent, so you need five cows to produce four live calves. By reducing the death rate in calves, you can mitigate the need for the fifth cow and there are technological solutions available for this.”
He said developing climate-smart agriculture would require renewed efforts across research, development and investment from local to global levels. Studies in Bangladesh had found that putting urea deeply in the soil in rice production areas increased output by one tonne per hectare.
Mr Meybeck said climate change had to be looked at globally as it was a global problem. It was impacting on tropical areas on the globe where there were many malnourished people. It could, however, bring increased production in northern countries, but it was already hitting some of the largest food-producing exporters, Brazil and Australia.
“The spike in food prices in the last year has been caused by climate, so this is a problem which is an immediate one,” he said.