The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability: Exam No: B025211 The

paper is about the pressures that the food system (FS) is facing currently in a context of climate change, related to the production and the global demand of food; and moreover, about identifying the issues on which the policymakers have to take decisions urgently to reach the main goal of the FS: ensure food for the global population, rising to almost 9 billion in 2050, based on a sustainable and equitable way. Its main statements to obtain this aim is that the FS needs a reappraisal, recognizing its failures, like the extent of hunger and the effects of unsustainable process of food production (loss of soil fertility, excessive extraction of water, etc); and identifying the drivers of change affecting the system, e.g. global population growth, demand, climate changes, competition of resources, among others. Therefore, substantial changes have to be made over all the components that interact in this complex system, which can be summarized in 5 key challenges: A. Balancing future demand and supply sustainably: improving productivity using existing knowledge and encouraging new sustainable technology to address future threats. In addition, the waste within producers and consumers (30% of global food) must be controlled along with an improvement in governance assuring a healthy competition of global actors. B. Addressing the threat of future volatility in the FS: avoiding spikes in prices which could increase the uncertainties of future fluctuations and, therefore, affect the economic and politic stability in some countries. C. Ending hunger: as undernutrition means severe and long-lasting effects in children and low-income countries. Therefore, it needs strong local and international political actors whom take in charge of this issue. In addition, agriculture must be encouraged where hunger is a problem to create access to food, generate employment and empower excluded groups. D. Meeting the challenges of a low emissions world: taking in account the important contribution of FS in GHG emissions. Hence, food production must be considered in negotiations on emissions reductions and new practices and policies in agriculture must be developed. E. Maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services while feeding the world: evaluating the services that ecosystems provide to the FS and internalizing its effects.

Despite there are priorities (key actions) to reach these challenges, one thing is clear: the fulfillment of one measure is not enough to meet them. Hence coordinated actions have to be taken over all this range of measures at the same time. Although this paper gives useful details about feeding the population expected in 2050, it seems strange that this level of growth is assumed without any questioning and any measure of population growth control is considered in the paper. As some authors mentioned many years ago, the control of population growth is necessary to avoid environmental impacts1 since this growth is defined as the responsible of the most environmental problems2. Finally, there is an absence of a diagram which shows the relations and connections within the net of measures described in the paper. Its necessary the definition of a rout map that helps policymakers to know the proper and efficient sequence of measures to put in practice. References: 1. Dowall D., (1980). An Examination Of Population-Growth-Managing Communities [on line]. Policies Studies Journal. Volume 9, Issue 3, pp 414-429. Available on: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.15410072.1980.tb00950.x/full 2. Meffe G, Ehrlich A.& Ehrenfeld D. (1993). Editorial: Human Population Control: The Missing Agenda [on line]. Conservation Biology. Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 1-3. Available on: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2386633 3. Foresight (2011). Final Project Report. The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability. The Government Office of Science, London. 211 pp.