Global food and water security, trade and market stability

Piñeiro, Valeria; Elverdin, Pablo; Piñeiro, Martín; Puricelli, Estefania; Regúnaga, Marcelo; and Villarreal, Federico. 2020. Global food and water security, trade and market stability. TF10: Sustainable Energy, Water, and Food Systems Policy Briefs 16. Saudi Arabia: T20. https://t20saudiarabia.org.sa/en/briefs/Pages/Policy-Brief.aspx?pb=TF10_PB16

The challenge to produce more food to meet the growing world demand requires a careful, integrated and global approach, to secure the efficient use of land, water and energy at the global level, aimed at increasing productivity and food supply with production systems which are environmentally friendly. Nowadays in many regions the crop production is still developed under intensive production systems, which are deteriorating the natural resources and contributing to global warming. The purpose should be to move to more environmentally friendly production systems. To support that process it is proposed to improve the measurement of sustainable practices in crop production and to monitor the production systems in different regions to provide international comparisons and track performance over time. At the same time, trade is, and will be in the future crucial to cope with a global production system environmentally friendly providing suffice food to meet food security, given that regional production and consumption imbalances associated with regional differences in resource endowments are very relevant. However, world trade of agricultural products continues seriously limited by trade policies and could be worsened by new measures implemented by some countries during or after the COVID-19 crisis. Therefore, the G20 should promote policies and measures to facilitate dialogue and information exchange on supply and demand to foster agreements between food trading partners, based on a more open trading system, aimed at reconciling both objectives: global food security and environmental sustainability.