FAO releases “The impact of disasters on agriculture and food security” report

• United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) has recently released a report titled “The impact of disasters on agriculture and food security”.
• It shows the first-ever global estimation of the impact on agricultural production with a focus on crops and livestock due to disasters and aims to put into context the scale of the cost of such events.

MAJOR FINDINGS

• Natural and man-made disasters have led to $3.8 trillion in crop and livestock losses over the last three decades.
• The world has also lost over $120 billion per year which amounts to five per cent of the annual global agricultural GDP.
• Disasters have increased in frequency from 100 per year in the 1970s to a whopping 400 events per year in the past 20 years.
• According to FAO
  • the average annual grain losses amounted to 69 million tonnes in the last three decades
  • the world lost some 40 million tonnes of fruit and vegetable production and 16 million tonnes of meat, dairy and eggs to disasters.
• Lower and lower middle-income countries witnessed “highest relative” losses of up to 15 per cent of their total agricultural GDP whereas Small Island Developing States (SIDS) reportedly lost seven per cent of their agricultural GDP.
• Women were also hit harder than men due to these disasters due to resource and structural constraints which women face to access “information, financial instruments, resources that they need to prepare to respond to or recover from disaster events.”

ABOUT UN FAO

• Food and Agriculture Organization is a specialised agency of the United Nations that leads international efforts to defeat hunger.
• Headquarters- Rome,Italy.
• Membership- 194 countries (including India) and the European Union.
• Its sister bodies are the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).