Kaveh Zahedi is the Director of the Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Environment at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In an interview with SV Krishna Chaitanya, he talks about the intertwined challenges of global hunger and climate change. Excerpts:
Agriculture is one of the major emitters of greenhouse gases. What work is FAO doing to tackle the challenge of food production as well as climate change?
We need to produce more with less. Today about 730 million people are still living in hunger. We still have malnutrition. We are still behind the targets of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG2) in terms of stunting. So, we know that right now we are not providing enough food for people around the world. The recent study that we did showed that it’s a bit of an unequal picture.
Whereas 1 in 9 are living in hunger globally, in Africa it’s about 1 in 5 even higher incidence. The world population is growing towards 10 billion people by the middle of the century. So this is the landscape we are working in. At the same time, climate change is happening and already impacting our agriculture and the communities that depend on agriculture. We can’t just work on food insecurity and forget the climate. We can’t just work on climate and forget food insecurity. We have to do these two together.
Recently, The New Indian Express published an article highlighting over 30% of soil in India has degraded. What is the scenario worldwide and how to address it?
Not just in India, about 30% of agricultural land globally has degraded because of excess use of chemical fertilisers and unsustainable practices. FAO is working with all the developing countries, including India, on their agricultural agenda. Producing more with less means we have to produce more, but with less input fertilisers, pesticides. That means more precision agriculture where there is better use of water, which is becoming scarce.
Currently, how much of climate finance is going into agriculture?
If you look at climate finance more broadly, including project-level private finance, not just development aid, only 4% is going into agrifood systems solutions, which is very small. If you take a much narrower lens, which is the conversation here in COP29, only 20% of the climate-tagged developmental assistance aid out of $100 billion target that was set within the UNFCCC, was going into agrifood systems. But what is worrying is the trajectory is only going down.
What about the accessibility to climate finance? Why are global funds not supporting agricultural reform, for instance in India?
Climate change is impacting agriculture and for many, that is a primary concern, but unfortunately very few of them translate that into concrete targets of how we need to invest in agriculture and build resilience to reduce emissions. So translating this sort of broader ambition into specifics is going to be a big part of the next round of NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) due in February next year.
We need to embed agriculture into NDCs at full scale so that you can see more investment, especially from the vertical funds such as the Green Climate Fund and Global Environment Facility. If it’s in the NDC as a critical investment for us to meet the Paris Agreement goals, then it becomes investable. We also need to look domestically. How do we repurpose some of the current agricultural investments within the countries so that they are also helping move the needle towards this sustainable, resilient agriculture.
FAO supports countries when they ask us to access some of these global funds. We have helped dozens of countries access these funds. They are not immediate investments. I think the Indian government is very sophisticated and is absolutely able to access these funds.
What are the other ways in which finance can be raised in agriculture?
The real transformation of the agri-food systems would cost us about $1.3 trillion a year. It’s not going to come uniquely and solely from climate finance. All of it has to be a package that drives this sort of direction change.
What are your expectations from the COP29? What is the message you want to give to the countries?
The message is loud and clear. Investing in sustainable and resilient agriculture is critical if we want to achieve the targets that we set ourselves under the Paris Agreement and nationally through the NDCs. We need further momentum from this COP29. When we are saying 30% of emissions are coming from agriculture, then at least 30% of investments should come to agriculture.