Daily Times

Cornell University Professor Dr Syed SH Rizvi on Wednesday highlighted major threats and challenges to the world’s food security and sustainability, stressing that their future depends upon developing sustainable food systems which use less land and water.

In his key note address at the inaugural session of the third international conference on biosciences, Dr Syed SH Rizvi, who is a professor of food process engineering, said that agricultural productivity was not rising fast enough to sustainably feed the world in 2050.

The three-day international conference is organised by the Biological Society of Pakistan (BSP) in collaboration with Eco-Science Foundation at the Government College University (GCU) Lahore to deliberate upon challenges and latest scientific developments in plant sciences, microbiology, animal sciences, biotechnology and environmental science. GCU Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Hassan Amir Shah chaired the conference’s inaugural session which also attended by thirteen eminent foreign scientists from Canada, USA, UK, Turkey, Malaysia, Iran and China and vice chancellors of different public sector universities of Pakistan.

Speaking on the occasion, Professor Rizvi also underlined the immediate need for reducing food wastage in production processes, storage and human consumption through scientific innovations. “If the loss and waste are cut in half by 2050, the world would need to produce 22 percent less food to feed 9 billion people,” he added.

The Cornell University professor said that the world’s food demand was estimated to be increased by 70 to 100 percent in the next three decades; 50 percent of the increase would be due to population growth to 9 billion, while other 50 percent would be due to changing dietary choices. He said that another challenge to the food security was decreasing cultivable land which would decrease down from 0.45 hectares per capital in 1996 to 0.15 hectares in 2050; when 70 percent of the world’s population would be urban.

Talking about the nutrition and health issues, Professor Rizvi said that out of a world population of 7 billion, about 2 billion people were suffering micronutrient malnutrition which he called the hidden hunger, while 800 million suffer from calorie deficiency. He added that our of 667 million children under the age of five worldwide, about 159 million were too short of their age and 50 million didn’t weigh enough of their height.

Published in Daily Times, May 10^th 2018.